After I was 14, my good friend and I visited a retailer known as the Pleased Herb Store. We needed to purchase mugwort, as a result of we had turn out to be obsessive about the concept of lucid dreaming and have been in dogged pursuit of any substance that might help our makes an attempt to maneuver by way of our desires with acutely aware intent. I can’t say that the mugwort labored; the tea was disgusting and we couldn’t efficiently smoke it, as a result of we didn’t find out about these magical little issues known as “rolling papers.” However I nonetheless keep in mind what I thought lucid dreaming would really feel like: A journey into some sort of purple-blushed twilight zone the place acquainted issues felt unreal however welcoming, and the ambiance didn’t correspond with any sense of earthly physics. I assumed it might really feel like Peanut!
Peanut is the sixth-ish album by New York-based musician and engineer Otto Benson, and the primary with vocals. He shed a variety of pores and skin earlier than arriving at this album’s dusky, dusty sound, which is outlined by mild nylon-stringed guitar and shivery Rhodes piano and lands someplace on the intersection of Frankie Cosmos, Hayden Pedigo, and Let It Die-era Feist. A scan of his meticulously maintained web site reveals a trove of hyperactive vaporwave underneath the identify Memo Boy; ambient music as Ronnie P; puckish hyperpop underneath the identify OTTO; a tingly beat tape with Mietze Conte; and at the least a handful extra experiments with completely different types of up to date digital pop. The primary time I noticed Benson reside, supporting Jessica Pratt in a former bingo corridor in Jersey Metropolis, he carried out alongside a robotic MIDI glockenspiel rig he had constructed himself.
No rating but, be the primary so as to add.
All of that is to say that kind is clearly necessary to Benson; though Peanut is his first album with lyrics, it isn’t a lot his “first actual album” as it’s one shapeshift amongst many. The primary music, “Mr. Peanut,” is wordless and speaks volumes: It opens with a clattering kick, one of many album’s solely drum sounds, as if Benson is shaking off all of the hyperactive noise of previous initiatives, solely to provide solution to a looking, somnambulant guitar line that floats by way of the remainder of the monitor. It’s the following music, “Purple and Neon,” that appears to clue you in to what’s taking place: “I’ve been right here for hours/Or perhaps days/My thoughts runs in circles/And the disco fades away.”
In fact, that’s a rare literal studying, maybe one not warranted by such circuitous, exploratory music. Songs like “Purple and Neon” and “Raisin” are comparatively easy on a structural degree—few chords, few elements—however they preserve a powerful sense of the psychedelic. Two thirds of the way in which by way of the previous, a unfastened solo begins to drift atop the monitor, like a moth fluttering across the nook of a projector display: sufficiently small to theoretically ignore, however current sufficient to attract your consideration. On “Raisin,” Benson sings off-kilter photographs in a quotidian approach: “Chasing a beetle from {a photograph}/Couldn’t catch it however I’m off my ass/Thought I noticed one other nevertheless it was only a raisin.” He repeats the title phrase time and again, drawing it out like an outdated crooner would sing the identify of a misplaced lover, making an errant piece of dried fruit sound like crucial speck within the universe.
