Oak Island

Oak Island

Dave Hartley is bassist for The War on Drugs and many other Philly bands, but he still needs to fully flex his creative muscles. His solo project, Nightlands, has become a steady, ongoing concern. Nightlands' sophomore album, Oak Island, wanders well beyond the experiments of 2010's fascinating Forget the Mantra into a robotic pop music that sounds like Hartley took the ideas of vintage pop songwriters and threw them at a few MIT teaching assistants. "You're My Baby" is an ambient tone poem where vocoder-treated harmonies carry a simple hook and various synthetic sounds threaten for nearly three minutes before finally coalescing into an end piece. "Nico" turns up the bubbling textures until it's a wall of swirling synths and layered vocals wandering through the airbrushed countryside. "I Fell in Love with a Feeling" turns into what an early computer might have devised as both a love song and a dance track, with stilted rhythms and stiff, mechanized vocals. The entire record plays like a concept album about a computer that's fallen in love with humanity.

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