By Jackie Lam
Cinematic music functions a lot like films themselves. We enjoy soundtracks and movie scores because of their ability to string together emotional moments that hook you in with a strong narrative pull. Growing up, I enjoyed my fair share of Danny Elfman and John Williams, and a large part of why those songs had such great appeal was because they conjured such vivid pictures and brilliant emotions.
And upon listening to Exray’s self-titled debut LP, their brand of lo-fi electronic pop could be the soundtrack to a sweetly sordid life. And it’s as if Exray’s can maintain a level of musical auteurship while still giving rise to singular tracks that could fit a scene in a movie.
Made up of the collaborative efforts of Jon Bernson and Michael Falsetto-Mapp, a duo from San Francisco, Exray’s s/t LP is an album where the emotional and narrative context takes precedent. The album starts off with “You Forgot,” a man’s monologue that could be perhaps a morose letter to a former love revealed, the kind of thoughts that seep out when one is feeling comfortably safe and alone. The emotiveness wavers back and forth and words like “open up like a paper door” creep up on you unexpectedly.
“Mary Hollow” struck a nerve with me, and it really carries a tone that reminds me like The Decemberists. This album, pound for pound, is nothing but tracks that seek to derive a range of emotions and tales from far and wide. Pulsating with a labryinth of industrial pips and squeaks, the instrumental “La Palma” is an urban dirge, and takes you to the underbelly of the city. “Remember Nothing” is a haunting track, and wraps you inside an alluring world of rhythmic spurts and engaging, loosely weaved together lyrics (Cardboard/mountains of glass/bystanders moving around/blue suit/caution tape/dancing with people I did not know).
Bernson and Falsetto-Mapp seem like a pair of discreet mavericks who have day jobs silkscreening band shirts or maybe delivering pizza at the Domino’s down the street. The kind whose true work is during the afterhours, capturing stolen moments around the city with sundry recording devices.
It’s an album that seems like the appropriate score for most of Fincher’s films (“Hesitation” was featured on the soundtrack for The Social Network), music that’s orchestrated to opens the portal to the dark psyche of the mind. While not in any way sprawling, Exray’s debut is a compilation of disparate sources: industrial beats for a metropolitan miasma, or a synth-pop euphoria that could be a score for a French romance.
And like their counterparts who build music around a narrative, moments (The Clientele, The Decemberists, The Western States Motel), Exray’s builds a aural cityscape composed of low-fi sensibilities while employing touches of eclectic sources to make it their own. The tracks bleed into one another, and feels like a watercolor painting where the colors are blurred and the lines undefined.
Exray’s s/t album was released on Tuesday, January 25th on Howell’s Transmitter. They'll be celebrating the release of their album with a show at Cafe Du Nord in San Francisco on February 4th.
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