Jensen Sportag’s debut album Stealth of Days is a sonic hybrid that stands out for its audaciousness even in the context of a dance music scene striving for experimentation. (I recently found out that “ambient gabber” is an actual thing that people are making, as mind-bendingly improbable as that sounds.) What’s notably bold about what the duo (Austin Wilkinson and Elvis Craig of Nashville, Tennessee) are up to isn’t that it hasn’t been done before—it has, a bunch. What makes it a real aesthetic risk is that in the past it’s been done so badly.At its most basic, Stealth of Days is R&B from the period during the late 70s and early 80s where the form first fell hard for synthesizers mixed with the smooth, chilled tones of the more self-consciously tasteful end of the late-90s dance music boom. Wilkinson and Craig like to cite the clean-lined works of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Christian Fennesz as inspirations. A lot of musicians who were working in the late 90s attempted exactly the same thing, and ended up producing the kind of generic, enervated electronic soul that you mostly hear as background music at restaurants that are trying way too hard to project a hip atmosphere.
One of the things that keeps the album from following a similar formula is the pair’s ability to steer just shy of the point where tastefulness starts to suffocate a record. Stealth of Days is full of little touches that keep things slightly unbalanced, and therefore compelling. The album-opening “Rain Code” puts a choppy beat behind a satiny R&B vocal melody. “Six Senses” piles layer upon layer of grainy reverb and delay over a two-step beat that in other hands might sound blandly crisp, and occasionally spaces out into brief ambient passages. Throughout the bass synths are dialed a notch or two past “funky” and just into “rude.”
There are actually enough interesting little quirks like these that you can easily get distracted from the fact that Stealth of Days is at heart a pop record. The compositions are complex, and so fastidiously arranged that you might get sucked into trying to pick out some kind of flaw. Sometimes it’s a little harder to overlook—on “Light Through Lace” and the late-album standout “Under the Rose” you can hear Ryuichi Sakamoto’s influence in the crystalline textures and immaculately composed percussion, but strip all that away and the the tracks on Stealth of Days sound pretty much like they could be New Edition songs.
During the recent CMJ Music Marathon, Jensen Sportag was booked to perform live at the Cascine Records showcase, but Craig was too sick to perform. Instead, Wilkinson simply DJed their original compositions alongside remixes that they’ve done for other acts. You could tell that it was a hastily assembled fix, and the fact that Wilkinson wasn’t blending the tracks but rather pausing between them to introduce each one made it an awkward experience. Still, for the most part people were content to stand and watch, instead of bailing for something else. It really is that absorbing. Reported by Pitchfork 5 hours ago.