Player Piano by Memory Tapes
LABEL: Carpark

Dayve Hawk has always found his music treading the blogosphere, mostly under his previous lo-fi electronica recording monikers, Memory Cassettes and Weird Tapes. But the New Jersey native’s latest release, Player Piano, is clearly pushing Hawk into a different direction, but staying familiar at the same time. While still abiding to some of the laws of chillwave (albeit very few), Player Piano is an extensive effort that features bubbling bass lines, vibrant synth layers, and a pleasantly crooning Hawk. It’s a pining record that shows a maturing Hawk and a vast use of instrumentation, that’s occasionally hampered by stylistic inconsistencies.

“To know chillwave is to know Memory Tapes.” Someone probably said that two years ago, but with Player Piano, Hawk’s project is distancing itself from the seasonal sub-genre that took the indie music scene by storm a couple summers back. After a short intro, Hawk’s latest opens with “Wait In The Dark”, a blissful track that’s carried by Hawk’s relaxed and timely layering of sounds. Though probably the most bedroom-wave song on the album, Hawk still manages to make a smorgasbord of sound by implementing simple-yet-tremendous drumming an eerie synth, and lyrical gloom, “This is how it ends/ We just stand each other up.”

  Wait In The Dark by Memory Tapes

While many consider ‘chillwave (glo-fi)’ a dying genre, many artists (Teen Daze, Com Truise, and Memoryhouse, for example) have been keeping the flame alive (still not sure how I feel about it) by being creative with the sound. But in the same way 2009 was the coming-out party for chillwave, 2011 seems to be the year of break-ups for this awkwardly-named sub-genre. With former glo-fi heavyhitters like Toro Y Moi leaving the scene in favor of a broader use of instruments, fans of chillwave were left aghast. Where Toro Y Moi took on a full-band, more lyrically focused mindset, Memory Tapes’ Player Piano plays like a refresh button on chillwave. It’s still shoegazey and nostalgic, but features such a wide array of emotions and instrumentation that are akin to other genres. On the instrumental tracks “Humming” and “Fell Thru Ice II”, Hawk tinkers with vast, expansive sounds — droning organs, pulsating percussion, and tragic horns suck listeners in into a vortex-like sound that’s almost impossible to truly classify as a single genre. Other tracks like “Fell Thru Ice” and “Offers” contain those all too familiar 80’s synthpop loops and samples that are just too irresistible to ignore, but they channel a 70’s nostalgia, not unlike Destroyer’s Kaputt which came out earlier this year.

  Yes I Know by Memory Tapes

Player Piano seems more of a musical experimentation by Hawk than anything else. Dayve Hawk effectivley captures, both, joy and gloom. There are many moments of pleasurable electronica and it seems as though Hawk was more interested in dabbling with styles on this album and less on creating one cohesive sound. The album trips over itself on moments like “Sunhits”, where trite synths make it seem as though Memory Tapes is doing an Owl City cover. but, overall, though, Hawk’s eagerness and curiosity has led to another astute collection of tunes.


REVIEWED BY ADRIAN ROJAS
ADRIAN’S FAVE TRACKS: “Wait In The Dark” • “Offers”
Read more from Adrian on his blog, On the Importance of Being Rash

FREE MP3: “Wait in the Dark”