Producer Alex Brettin is going to give your psyche a perfectly mellow kind of a contact high with his latest album Going Going Gone, released through his chief artistic channel, the Mild High Club. With sound mixing and engineering by Eric Lau in Xiamen, China, and added beatific beat support from smooth R’nB raconteur Knxwledge Going Going Gone manages to accelerate the AOR and progressive rock influences of Mild High Club’s 2018 album Skiptracing, furthering it into the realm of stone-cold, jazz-fusion. Alex’s taciturn ability to synthesize funk, acid jazz and, yacht rock, and Brazillian rhythms into pithy, two-minute vignettes of rock ‘n roll excellence is simply intoxicating, and what’s more, he does it with the flare of a rising hip-hop beat-smith. Each track on Going Going Gone is like a kaleidoscopic prism with an indeterminate number of sides; one that light never seems to strike the same way twice, making each encounter feel as novel as the last.
Going Going Gone opens up with the twilight-tinted, jazz piano lead and starlight cascade guided number “Kluges I.” The title is a reference to an ill-suited assortment of parts or techniques designed to make a fast and dirty workaround to a problem, and is derived from the worlds of engineering and computer science, among others. I don’t know if this is a tongue in cheek nod to Alex’s own working style, or some other kind of guilty confession on the artist’s part, but it is certainly not reflective of the final product, “Kluges I” is as smooth as buttercream, as is the following track, “Dionysian State,” a saxy, jaunt of snappy synths and buzzy harmonics that coasts on a quivering drift of hedonic excess and a downy cush, techno-colored jazz-rock plumage.
“A New High” is a trippy taste of Brazilian samba that feels like it is rapidly cycling through decades and fashion options like Dr. Who attempting to navigate the Tardis manually after being unwittingly exposed to a potent dose of LSD. ” It’s Over Again” is similarly fascinated with woozy South American grooves but somehow manages charts straighter course- one with just as many fantastic embellishments and gratifying subgenre layovers. “I Don’t Mind The Wait” sounds like Stereolab’s retroactive contribution to Rei Momo, while “Me Myself and Dollar Hell” combines sharp and glinting disco melodies with briny, surf guitars to carry you out to sea and over the ledge of the world before the blase of a tangerine stained sundown.
The only things seemingly missing from Going Going Gone are reservations and hesitations, and the only thing being left behind are the expectations you came to it with.
Buy and stream Going Goin Gone via Bandcamp below:
Going Going Gone is out via Stones Throw.
