GutterPutter

Just under a month ago, at the time of writing this review, a peculiar electronic musician Porter Robinson have released his sophomore album Nurture 7 years after his debut World. Although he garnered a loyal cult following for his creative & accessible mix of the artsy IDM with house music & synth-pop, it’s not exactly a gigantic hit with the critics & with escalating expectations over his next release, he shied away from the music scene for a long while. Bouts of depression over the possibility of an imposter syndrome have put him off making music for a long time until around 2017 where he gets himself a girlfriend. Gradually, he starts to find the time to work on his second LP, incorporating folktronica, piano music & a more explicit indie-pop energy to it. Now, Nurture is finally out with several very positive review scores from several publications & while they may not be the most laudatory, I find the record to be easily among the best of this year. Few records have ever felt as heartwarming as this one by a long shot.

The intro track ‘Lifelike’ shows some immaculately pure display of baroque pop on top of its twinkly mix of bells, hi-hat beats & ambience. The musical direction isn’t by no means original, but it more than makes up for its serene feeling & it’s this byproduct of its execution that helps to drive it through the album. ‘Look at the Sky’ is among its biggest highlights for me with its bombastic glitch-hop influence & rave-like beats to go along with the emotive lyrics – ‘Look at the sky, I’m still here/ I’ll be alive next year/ I can make something go’. What it lacks for sophisticated songwriting, it makes up for how its accessibility can help enable other people buy into its optimism. With the female vocals, it adds to the intimacy of the project & enables a sort of tranquillity throughout the album. ‘Get Your Wish’ continues the driving sense of hope with its upbeat fainted piano & with its dense yet vast production, the album shows so much energy within it thanks to the highly choppy song structure.

A common criticism I found around the album is that it can come off as being too similar between each of its track & while I can see the point within it, I argue otherwise that it undermines the largely mellow atmosphere of ‘Sweet Time’, the krautrock-like repetition in ‘Wind Tempos’ & the innocuous, arcade game vibes of ‘do-re-me-fa-sol-la-ti-do’. For all its seemingly generic electro-pop outlook, Porter Robinson pushes what one can do with the structure to its logical conclusion. The crackling auto-tunes of ‘Unfold’, the notable glitch-hop production in ‘dullscythe’ & a tint of bubblegum dance in ‘Mirror’ gives just about enough variance between each track to reward a couple more listens. Eventually, it all cumulates in the climatic, electro-shoegaze display in ‘Trying to Feel Alive’ which is reminiscent of M83 at their best. I can go on for a while about the subtle intricacies of Nurture & how it’s an essential gateway in a way to the underground electronic scene but such ramble is unneeded.

So many records now have a fixation on cynicism & displeasure on the world now & although that includes some of my personal favourite this year like Black Country, New Road from earlier, that doesn’t always mean that it’s a positive. One of my biggest likes about this album in particular is how it’s filled to the brim with hopes & innocence. One of my biggest highlights would be ‘Blossom’ which is a more lo-fi, indie-folk tune which best shows the thesis of Robinson’s record – a sincere declaration of love & the desire to uphold this feeling forever. ‘If I can’t stop time/ I’ll build a world where God cannot take us/ There’s no need to think of time’ is up there as the most refreshing way to say ‘I love you’ since fun. pulled out their ballad ‘The Gambler’ more than a decade before. You can listen to every pop music that talks about teenage love 10 years back, but they will never reach the same kind of youth exuberance as Porter Robinson ever did around his girlfriend.

Nurture is one of my top picks among the best albums of the year for me as proves itself to be amongst the most affirmative in the prospect of one’s life. The way Robinson utilise the glitchy production with the mix of chamber instrumentations & his signature house style to create some of the most sanguine pop tracks in ages is outright invigorating. I have the feeling that in time, this record might be seen as having cemented Porter Robinson’s legacy as being with the likes of Daft Punk, the Chemical Brothers or Aphex Twin. What it lacks in avant-garde experimentation, it more than makes up for striking the balance between showcasing most alternative-electro genres & being convenient for most other people to enjoy. Don’t skip this out; you might leave the album with the biggest smile on your face in a long time.