#digicore

#digicore

Nick Quan's song " Heavensafe," which runs big feelings through a bigger pedalboard, features a funny declaration: "I've turned to slop again." This past August, when the extraordinary guitarist released Warbrained, shoegaze might have been saying so, too. By then, its latest-and most puzzling-progeny was " cloud rock," a budding vanguard that subverted its central extremes: numbness first, and noise, if at all, second.

This is a comeback story: a former "junkie, alcoholic" who lost control, now recovered and reborn, embracing the bliss and identity-making potential of music like never before. It's a classic hip-hop underdog narrative, and this is very much a rap album, just adorned with a Splice pack's worth of pixie-lated dust. Rave music is often associated with druggy abandon, but for Brown it seems more about the heady rush of joy conjured by whizzing tempos and neon synths.