Often children are taught to use “memory palaces”: an imaginary place built in one’s imagination to hold specific details or ideas that one needs to remember. When you need to recover something from your memory, you “walk through” your memory palace to where you left it. It’s a private experience but research shows it’s a very effective way to increase recall.
The new album from Teen Daze is fittingly titled The Inner Mansions, a title which captures perfectly the spacious-yet-personal sonic world of creator Jamison. (It is also a way more satisfying concept than “memory palace” which is disappointingly literal. Who picks that sorta shit anyway?) Everything on the record stretches out, relaxing across time (the shortest song is 3:19, with most between 5 and 7 minutes) and frequencies. Jamison doesn’t shy away from bass but he is also not preoccupied on it, focusing his attention instead on the covering the aural landscape in a glassy, shimmery sheen of synthesizers and clockwork drum machines. Don’t let the album’s electronic nature confuse you, though – there’s more John Adams or Steve Roden than EDM at work here, and you could get lost for days in the folds of these sounds.
But the most impressive element of Mansions is its pure song-y-ness. These aren’t beats or tracks, but songs – with lyrics and melodies and arrangements to go along with them. Emotionally Mansions has the feel of slightly-stilted melancholia, the kind of sadness you see and maybe envy in a shy fifteen-year-old. Songs like album opener “New Life” and “By Love” summon the emotional tones of the record without pushing it too far; it’s suggestive and interesting rather than saccharine or whiny. (The album’s only sour note is the Frankie Rose collaboration “Union,” which really only feels out of place.) The soothing quality of the album comes at the expense of excitement, but Jamison doesn’t seem very concerned with that. It feels like spending a few months in the author’s own mansion – maybe the winter ones, when there’s snow on the ground and a fire in the hall.
Bars: 4/5
