On his 2015 debut,
Many Levels of Laughter, Chicago singer/songwriter
J Fernandez created a contained world of neatly organized bedroom pop, inspecting themes of solitude and disconnection with colorful tunes that borrowed from '60s psych-pop heroes. The album's sound palette employed psychedelic influences nicely without ever pushing them outside of an indie rock comfort zone, much like the earlier output of
Fernandez's sometimes tourmates
Unknown Mortal Orchestra or backward-leaning bands like
Foxygen. Sophomore album
Occasional Din takes a surprising shift toward more adventurous and acid-bathed sounds. This shift is communicated in the first moments of the album, as field recordings, swirling keyboard lines, and ambient clouds melt into tempered fuzz guitar, falsetto vocal harmonies, and live drums washed in healthy doses of flanger on "Common Sense." The album is front-loaded with three of its best songs, as "Common Sense" abruptly transitions into the similarly arranged "Unwind" followed by the slinky orchestral groove of "Volcanic Winter." The album continues this seamless flow from song to song, recalling the song cycles of
Brian Wilson and
Van Dyke Parks and at the same time evoking the muted, detached psychedelia of contemporaries like
Shy Boys and
Chris Cohen. Clearly the product of one musician meticulously sculpting arrangements, all ten songs on
Occasional Din move in quick but subtle shifts, with 12-string guitar or reverb-saturated bell sounds showing up for only part of a verse, Mellotron lines morphing into backwards guitar solos, or entire blocks of instrumentation dropping out of the mix, all so smoothly that it's sometimes hard to notice the first time around. By the time centerpiece "Rewards" arrives around the halfway mark, the album's deft arrangements and insular approach have created a comfortable dream world for listeners to get lost in. We're allowed to snap out of this daydream for a moment when the song's more straightforward opening lyrics come out of nowhere, but just as quickly,
Fernandez lets the tune dissolve into a beautiful murk of intervening found sounds. At just over a half-hour running time,
Occasional Din is best absorbed on repeat, where the refined details of the songs can reveal themselves fully and listeners can get cozy in
Fernandez's brightly drawn internal world. ~ Fred Thomas