Although she’s a longtime collaborator in New York’s experimental and membership scenes, Jamie Krasner’s solo work as james Ok has all the time felt far more airtight. Her collagist model holds difficult feelings in dreamy suspense, conjuring a zone aside the place she alone controls the climate. Swerving between dusky trip-hop, pummeling shoegaze, and hazy atmosphere, her music captures fraught emotions in queasy panoramas. Her prior albums, 2016’s PET and 2022’s Random Woman, contained their shimmer and chaos like freshly shaken snow globes, leaving Krasner’s presence solely half-discernable beneath flurries of synths and industrial squall. The moments when the air cleared had been spellbinding, although it felt like solely a matter of time earlier than she once more slipped out of view.
The third james Ok album, Buddy, is exceptional sufficient as a chunk of pop craftsmanship, however its actual achievement is in how fantastically Krasner is ready to chart a path from her non-public realm into our personal. She distills the musical eclecticism of her earlier work right into a crystalline interpretation of dream pop, utilizing the floor blur and ahead movement to maintain weighty concepts in flight. Her manufacturing continues to be suffused with mist, nevertheless it’s grown greater, brighter, and extra enjoyable. The pillowy ambiance supporting her voice now has a quickly shifting and dynamic floor flooring beneath it, one which veers from drum’n’bass to downtempo, IDM to G-funk. With some slight tweaks, the musician preserves the signature hazy dream logic of her lyricism whereas coming extra absolutely into her personal problems.
Not like her prior albums, which had been self-produced, Krasner developed Buddy alongside a clutch of collaborators together with Patrick Holland (aka Mission Pablo), Priori, ex-terrestrial, Ben Bondy, and the Berlin-based Particular Visitor DJ. With their assist, she manages to provide her music a brand new cinematic sweep and propulsion. “Blinkmoth (July Combine)” begins at a whisper and conjures a full horizon. Modulating a gasping, processed pattern of her voice in order that it runs parallel with the dusky home beat, Krasner creates a stuttering vocal hook that’s virtually indistinguishable from the peal of an electrical guitar. Because the track builds to a head, she reminds you of her ear for texture by barreling into the already panoramic sound with the form of aqueous, side-long guitar solo that Alex Scally makes use of to gentle up the most effective Seashore Home songs.
Krasner’s facility for reverb-drenched instrumentals makes comparisons to the greats of shoegaze and dream pop inevitable. However she additionally has a straightforward intimacy to her singing that evokes Dido or Sarah McLachlan and will have made her a trillionaire within the Starbucks CD economic system. It is a high quality used sparingly on earlier releases, however what’s sensible about Buddy is how clear and direct of a presence Krasner is. A track like “On God” ranks amongst her most full-on pop moments: Krasner pirouettes by way of a crush of reverbed guitar whereas weighing deep questions on belief and religion. Her lyrics and supply are cryptic however conversational, the existential ponderings of a barely stoned finest buddy. “Doom Bikini” turns Krasner’s introversion inside out, weaving daydreams and nervousness right into a tapestry celebrating an overactive lifetime of the thoughts. Her sly humorousness is written everywhere in the track, which peaks with the sudden whine of a G-funk synth, one other wild flare-up from her creativeness.
