Flux Pavilion’s debut album Tesla was a blended mixture of darkened EDM and electronic music. His latest album .wav gives us more of the artist’s abilities and musicality in rhythm, storytelling and talent.
It is hard not to recognise a similar tone in the album’s first song ‘Everywhere Cable Goes Somewhere’. It has a similar dark and avant style which Pavilion brings to his work a lot.
But what really catches by surprise, is when ‘Survive’ plays through the speakers. This song is different from classical Flux Pavilion, a fusion of EDM and dream pop. It came as a pleasant surprise to learn that the vocalist was Meesh, a hip-hop artist with a small following on Spotify, known for dreamy demeanour and vocals. The song was also co-produced by British EDM artist Jon Gooch, known by his alias Feed Me.
The more the album plays, the more you can sense this change in rhythmic and difference in style. This was Flux Pavilion, but it was a lighter, transcendence incarnate with the sound creating and telling a story of a different world.
The album’s fourth song ‘Lions Cage’, produced with vocal artist Nevve – fellow Electronic/Dance artist who has often been kept a mystery in terms of identity – brought this sensational feeling to the mix. You really feel the album’s narrative and you experience them most in this song. It’s as if you are being freed from a metaphorical cage, soaring through wind and sky.
This is juxtaposed by what could be referred to as the ‘dilemma’ song – ‘Partial Fatigue in 8 Minor’. The opening entrances, and deters the previous dream and vibrancy of the vocals, returning to Pavilion’s darker sound. The sound is reminiscent of a modernised ball, just like the show Bridgerton incorporated modern music into its production. Pavilion has modernised through EDM the music of Regency. As the music plays, you visualise more clearly the storyline at play here through the rising sounds reaching an eventual climax. The song concludes with a cascading, melodramatic noise that ends into an abrupt darkness, as if signalising that the dilemma has come to conclusion.
Fast-tracking down the album, fighting to not get lost in the whimsical yet natural hi-fi talent of Flux Pavilion’s sound, ‘Twitterbird’, captures the midpoint of the album’s narrative. You begin to picture this small blue-coloured bird mixing with the battered palettes of a horizon – its movements in tune to the song. To say that Pavilion hasn’t captured a breath of fresh air with this song would be to underestimate its beauty as EDM music.
Both ‘Breathe’ and ‘You and I’ indicate fighting, alluded drama and bickering between jilted lovers. The music in ‘Breathe’ and ‘You and I’ begin to juxtapose each other as it plays on the calm before a storm, painting and shifting the narratives. In ‘Fall to Me’ this style becomes much clearer as we get the perspective of the two lovers caught in a vortex of emotions. Confusion, although subtle, is made evident in Pavilion’s sound as the dominating emotion in this storyline. As the album resumes down this path, we come to its final act.
‘LOVE’, the final track, begins with a softened guitar – reminiscent of popular romances and novelisations of the feelings you experience at the end of a film, where love is the most powerful factor. As the strums begin to blend into the fragile yet dreamy vocals, the music shifts to an electric guitar, drowning out the vocals as the song progresses. Here we see Pavilion’s conclusion. The end of an emotional and varied album, telling stories of freedom, hope and love, leaving the listeners on edge asking: “What comes next?”
Words by Mattie Osborne
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