Australian trio
Chase Atlantic dive deeper into their dreamy electronic pop and SoundCloud R&B with 2021's woozy
Beauty in Death. The album follows their equally atmospheric 2019 set Phases, and finds them having largely produced the record on their own in Los Angeles during the shutdown from the COVID-19 pandemic. As with Phases,
Beauty in Death is a genre-bending album in which lead singer
Mitchel Cave, singer/saxophonist
Clinton Cave, and singer/guitarist Christian Anthony evoke a kind of post-modern combination of '90s R&B outfit
Jodeci and
the 1975. There's a downtempo quality to the album, and tracks like "Paranoid," "Pleasexanny," and "Empty" find the group sinking into shimmering minor-key grooves marked by buzzy drill-bit percussion, glassy synths, vocoder-drenched melodies, and the occasional Middle Eastern flute flourish. It's a claustrophobically self-conscious vibe, straddling the emotional chasm between thoughtful introspection and #nof*&ksgiven debauchery. Tracks like "Out the Roof" showcase the band's inclination toward performative swagger as they revel in postapocalyptic bad-boy tropes like waxing poetic about their car's afterburner flamethrower. Similarly, on the buoyantly narcotic "Slide," they grapple with their emotional angst over relationships by using drugs, or at least drug metaphors, singing "Mental pressure; only text her when I'm noddin' off" and "I think the nitrous did damage, I can't feel my legs," all before launching into a magnificently gratuitous sax solo. Drugs and depression color much of
Beauty in Death, and
Chase Atlantic certainly aren't the first band to write a love song that's really about getting high, as they do on "Molly." That said, the group's commitment to their half-lidded loverman persona is oddly hypnotic, and
Beauty in Death vibrates with their distinctive blend of old-school rock star hedonism and internet feels. ~ Matt Collar