ALBUM REVIEW: Ilias – All The Way Up
Courtesy of Carsten Petersen – a bitter man without coffee.
★★★★☆
A new day has come, a new record has to be reviewed. Once again, it deviates from what I usually like to review. Once again, this review is completely against my usual personality. The artist is not only alive, he is even young! The record has come out on the 25th of July this very year and can not be found in a magazine dedicated to classic rock and old black-and-white movies. The music can be heard in front of your girlfriends without the oh so well-known fear that she will jump out of the window of your 14th floor apartment. However, it is also not the record of a well-known artist where I could just let out all my frustration and anger of not getting any coffee this morning. This job is getting harder and harder.
The album in question is called All the Way Up and is the second work of a young artist called Ilias, an Algerian producer and musician living in Sydney, Australia. Pretty colorful background and, well, it sure does lead to some pretty colorful music. In a certain way, the approach of this album can be compared to Sleep from Tom the Lion, the artist reviewed on this site a few weeks ago. Like that album, the main focus of this record is pop music, but it is not your everyday shitty pop, but pop songs with intricate arrangements, unusual sounds creating lush soundscapes and twisted rhythms along with a soothing, soft singing voice concentrating on themes of love, desire and breakup.
However, there are also clear differences between All the Way Up and that other lush pop record. First of all, despite the moments of melancholy, the whole record has a rather sunny feel, due to using brighter sounds and often working in the higher registers. Second, the album never purely focuses on one single mood. The most interesting moments are curtesy of two instrumentals, ‘Picture the Sun’ and ‘Jet Glow’ which is the highlight of this record – a dreary, slightly druggy, completely spaced out instrumental with all kinds of rainbow sounds and a very mystical atmosphere. In the end, it is really just a bunch of strange sounds woven together but man, it’s done so well! If I wouldn’t know better, I would think that Brian Eno has decided to reside on the sunny shores of Australia. ‘Picture the Sun’ is a bit more on the quiet, peaceful side but is still nice enough and does a great job of introducing a new sound after the first two opening tracks.
There is also an instrumental reprise of the hypnotic, slightly metallic sounding rhythm-fest ‘Fire Away’, and while even more downbeat, it certainly nails that relaxing feeling that everyone trying to escape the busy world needs once in a while. Now, most of the rest of the tracks more or less follow a different direction, albeit also filled with all kinds of different sounds and rhythms. They are mostly love songs, some more melancholic and dreamy like ‘It’s All About Her’, some more upbeat like ‘She’s Someone Else´s Problem Now’. At times the focus is more on spaced out keyboards, at other times on jangly guitars. This means that each song does differ from the last one enough so you are never stuck on a single mood for more than a few minutes. It also means that each song comes with a few nice surprises in using unusual sounds, like that sort of musical box like melody of ‘Turn the Clock Back.’ Note especially how the childlike cheerfulness of this song gives way to that otherworldly twilight-feel of ‘Jet Glow’, being representative for the twists and turns this record takes in its approach to mood.
It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s those two strange sound collages that I picked as the best tracks of the album. It is surely a great record with great adventurous and exotic aspects to it, but not surprisingly, it’s the love songs – roughly one half of the record – where the rub lies for me. Even though, they are still interesting with all these atmospheric textures, but, dare I say, these tracks are still a bit too, well, harmless for me and tone down the experimental nature of this record considerably. Nothing really wrong with that, but only seldom will you find a song with more edges like ‘Finding You’ with its screechy guitar and a sorrowful atmosphere. It is all a bit too jangly for my taste and most of the time I just expect another instrumental like ‘Jet Glow’ where the real potential of these sounds created seems to come to life. Most of the other songs hint at that potential but somehow fail developing it any further.
Nevertheless, this is just another terrific album that goes to show that something like a future in pop music can exist, just don’t expect it in a form of another disney star. It is worth to mention though, that Ilias is gonna release another album in the near future – his third one overall. That record, according to the artist, is going to be a purely instrumental album with the name The Space Between, a record describing “the story of a space shuttle woman pilot on launch day: her life, her doubts, her courage, her dreams…”. Ilias describes his new upcoming project as an “entirely instrumental, electric, neo-classical journey…” For this humble reviewer, this sounds like a damn promising project. No jangly love songs, just pure instrumental bliss in the form of ‘Jet Glow’? Count me in! Gosh, I really need to sort out my problems with women…
Now if you will excuse, I really need my damn coffee now.
Buy the album here
RELATED:
