Socially Inept‘s acoustic atmosphere is the bond that unifies the album into a whole. It is a submarinal reverb that I’m quite familiar with: Brian Eno’s Music For Airports, Aphex Twin ‘s Selected Ambient Works Vol. 1, or even the muddy echo of My Morning Jacket, they all evoke the same mood in me. It is an agoraphobic sensation: The impression of being underwater. The feeling that the aquatic sound field I am in is actually cohabitated by invisibles and unknowns whose sounds reach me from mysterious locations.
The light shines through the murky echo only to show reflections of the others, never the originals. Crisp drums are sent out as scouts to probe for the perimeter of the space, but they find no edge –just an elastic membrane that bounces them back towards the surface. The melodies are the currents of each track. As warm as the Gulf Stream, their sonar-soft synths gently sway and push along through the endless depths of the deep sound field.
As warm as the melodies on Socially Inept are, they do not quite keep out the cold undercurrent of darkness. The song titles raise the first flag of alert: “Place Gun to Head,” “Out of Phase,” “Deep Like Airline Failure,” and of course the title track. Scheming with the bleakness of the titles is a diverse choir of vocoded sirens, whispering and luring you further down towards the darker bass. Like sulfur bubbling up through the thick crust of the subconscious, the titles and voices speak to something much more concealed than the beats and melodies could reveal alone.
It is a fusion of the dark to the light that is the strength of Socially Inept. An electronic testimonial that mixes angelic melodies among a chorus of sirens, brittle beats with a soggy bass. By channeling the ominous through the inspiring, Proem gives us an ocean teeming with life and perspective. Cheers Proem, it’s a great one.
Socially Inept is OUT NOW on Merck Records.
