Having become ever more hi-fi in recent years, Ernest Greene, prince of the none-so-hipster chillwave genre, returns to the chewed-tape aesthetic he started out with, and comes up with some psychedelic, plunderphonic gems. A little like the Avalanches, Mister Mellow has found vocal samples swimming in and out of organ tones, baggy hip-hop rhythms and tropical exotica, topped with Greene’s naive, stoned singing style.
There are only a handful of actual songs, linked by burbling interludes, but they are good ones: Get Lost is a densely lush deep house anthem, while Hard to Say Goodbye’s uptempo disco and chirpy wordless chorus vie with a melancholy mood.
The cover art, an assemblage that features a Xanax pill, an overflowing ashtray and Big Bird in a tacky cap reading CHILLWAVE, suggests Greene isn’t totally at ease with himself, but the beauty of his information overload makes for a benign kind of millennial disquiet.
