The Daily Spin, June 27
alt-J | Relaxer
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
If you want to suggest an album, good news! You can do so right here!
Album: RELAXER (2017)
Artist: alt-J
Link:
It’s hard for any group to sustain great success over long periods of time - and obviously there are exceptions to that rule, but it does feel a little bit like you get two, and if you’re particularly lucky, a third. It’s with that in mind that I acknowledge alt-J’s run from An Awesome Wave through This Is All Yours to RELAXER, today’s album.
Critics, most notably Pitchfork, panned a lot of alt-J’s catalogue, this album included, for being tuneless and beige, fading into a background that shouldn’t be possible to disguise within. I will give them that in its quieter moments, RELAXER is guilty of much the same, of disappearing into itself until it becomes nothingness, empty, devoid.
That, however, is a small examination of all the things that this album is capable of, however. By reducing alt-J to their slowest (and therefore weakest) moments, reviewers ignore some of the best work that the group has put out to date. It doesn’t always work - ‘Hit Me Like That Snare’ is a deeply uncomfortable examination of passion, but then you follow it with ‘Deadcrush,’ a pulling, violent synth affair, sawing its way under falsettos, or ‘Adeline’, a six-minute journey through the wilderness that culminates in an explosion of sound and feeling, desperate vocals working tirelessly the same way that every other instrument marches on, ceaselessly into forever.
If we were all forced into our smallest moments, the reviews would likely not be stellar, and I’m disappointed to have seen this be the case for alt-J. I hope that I don’t make that same mistake.
Rating: 8.3/10
Best Tracks: Adeline; Deadcrush; 3WW
Worst Tracks: Hit Me Like That Snare