Anyone angled towards downcast, piano-house driven melancholia that makes you feel like you’ve spent the last few decades digging a grave will be floored by “Reassuring” from Jim-E Stack. I received the promo a few weeks ago and have been waiting to post ever since. It’s already become one of my favorite songs of the year, radiating with the same sort of chipped half-light early morning glow that makes Burial so flooring. Vocals are contorted into cetacean wails, electric guitars seem like they’re being heard from outside of an auditorium, and air horns even honk faintly in the distance.
It’s impossible to fully appreciate it in daylight. Let it crackle after everyone has gone home and you’re in the car feeling the crash or at home on the canvas. It’s an anthem for the exhausted, re-assuring only in it’s sense of a struggle mutually shared, but muddily articulated. It’s the first single from Stack’s Innovative Leisure debut, Tell Me I Belong (due July 29). Older gods given the press shout out include: John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Steve Reich, Omar-S and Robert Hood, and “contemporary boundary pushers Arca, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Actress.” But if the rest of the album is this good no one will talk about anybody else.
