- The Los Angeles artist combines jungle, 2-step and hip-hop into one emotional wallop.
- Brogan Bentley's second album begins with a breeze of far-away, slightly vintage-sounding chords. They remind me of Lee Gamble's game-changing Diversions 1994-1996, a release made entirely of beatless jungle interludes. These synths sound both futuristic and chewed-up, like melodies that have been lived-in for a long time. Sure enough, jungle breaks fly into the picture and take "Ecstasy" to another level, with Bentley's voice riding the momentum like a bird gliding on a thermal updraft. The lyrics speak of ecstasy, and the track is upbeat on the surface, but there's a wounded feeling to the whole thing, more of an elegy than a celebration.
This feeling surfaces again and again on Diapason Rex, which balances the bubbly side of UK dance music with cavernous arrangements and sad, sometimes emo vocals. Bentley has obvious antecedents, sure—I'm hesitant to ever reference Burial, but how else to explain the mournful, misty chords and limping garage beat on "Phantom?" Still, it's an impressive sort of an imitation, and once Bentley's reedy but earnest vocals come in ("I can't speak for anyone / I just want to be strong") it becomes all his own thing, transforming what might have seemed like pastiche into a wrenching plea every time his voice strains for those high notes. It's spellbinding.
These most arresting moments on Diapason Rex come when Bentley hits upon his own formula. The woozy, spacious trap of "The Work," which somehow folds in Houston-style pitched down vocals and curlicues of saxophone into a pretty-darn-heavy rap beat, is one example. Or you have the '80s synths that hang over "Trust Yourself"'s fidgety rhythms like a dense, damp mist.
If you haven't figured out, mixed emotions and almost paradoxical feelings are at the heart of Bentley's world, which reminds me of my recent time going off of SSRIs. You feel strange sensations in your head, sudden bursts of energy followed by awful fatigue and raw, searing emotions that can feel like everything happening at once. He uses the rhythms of jungle, house and garage as a way to fight, or at least live, through these emotions.
Brogan's abstract emotional narrative culminates in the one-two punch of the closing tracks, "The Keeper" and "Diapason Rex," which were written between the death of Bentley's best friend due to a drunk driver, and then his grandmother a year and a half later. "The Keeper" is the album's most soaring jungle track, with beautiful multi-tracked vocals that aim for an angelic presence, somewhere between a hymnal and a mourning song. The title track, meanwhile, sounds like the record tearing itself apart: bold, distorted samples shooting across the stereo spectrum like rhythms that can't quite come out, the vocals turned into an uncanny sputter.
Eventually, "Diapason Rex" settles into a profoundly lonely section of plucked strings and wafting vocals, which feels much different than anything that came before it, a picture of loss in two minutes. "We're stuck down here on this mortal plane," Bentley says in his liner notes for the album, which seems to explain this desolate ending. "But through music, something spiritual and sacred and timeless is transmitted."
One meaning of the word diapason is a grand burst or swell of harmony, which is what this album tries to accomplish before simply folding back in on itself, breaking into pieces and surveying the wreckage. That's a lot for a dance music album to carry on its shoulders, but Bentley's haunting sense of melody and harmony makes it every bit the wallop it sounds like on paper, a journey through the highest highs and the lowest lows. With Diapason Rex, Bentley has taken some of the most ubiquitous and familiar dance music sounds and made them deeply, inspiringly and sometimes almost uncomfortably personal.
Tracklist01. Ecstasy
02. Never Ending
03. Phantom
04. You Never Asked
05. The Work
06. Hollow
07. Trust Yourself
08. The Keeper
09. Diapason Rex