In his latest releases – an album titled Sight Unseen and an EP in Ella – the artist known simply as Electric E is making it clear to anyone listening that he isn’t planning on stepping away from his boundary-breaking experimentations anytime soon – if anything, he’s going after this goals harder than ever here. Combining influences that span the pop spectrum but always bring us back to the soul of vintage electronica, Sight Unseen and Ella present themselves as alternative documents through and through, and if you’re keen on music, I think you’ll find them to be everything they’re marketed as.
The EP is more conventionally composed than the album is, but when your title track is bursting with the kind of pop sensibilities this disc’s is, that should be the case. There’s nothing over the top or especially theatrical about Ella’s high or low points; “Again and Again” and “Got to Have It” both touch on a pop/rock component some might foolishly think would be out of Electric E’s reach, and if you ask me, they’re both two of the more stage-ready compositions he’s ever stamped his name on. For a player with an evolving sound, this record offers us a look at his style that sounds as consistent as anything in the mainstream.
There’s definitely an angular feel to the rhythm of Sight Unseen’s “The Rearrangement (Vocal – Urban Minstrels),” the R&B-flavored “I Don’t Take Any Pleasure (Hatred Was Not a Word),” “Situational Sangria (Vocal – Come Down)” and both versions of “China Doll,” but it never verges on sounding decadently jagged. For the most part, Electric E exhibits the kind of self-control I wish a lot of his Seattle contemporaries could bring into their own music, and provided it stays in his compositional repertoire, I think he’s going to see a lot more exposure in the press with his future work.
APPLE MUSIC: https://music.apple.com/us/album/sight-unseen/1522609041?ign-gact=3&ls=1
You can tell that this artist is coming out of the Pacific Northwest mostly because of his transparent influences – particularly in songs like “World of Mirrors,” “Memory Lane,” “Down By the Sea” and “Timelessness” – though I don’t think he can be accused of recycling any rhythm or rhyming from the storied past his local underground beat has been home to in the past century. Electric E is fairly intense about his original stylization of even the most subtle of details in his material, and were he not, I don’t know if he would have the kind of momentum behind his output that he does this season.
If you’ve yet to sit down with the music of Electric E, I would highly recommend doing so before the month of November has come to an end. Sight Unseen and Ella arguably give listeners the best one-two punch of an introduction to his sound that they could potentially get their hands on before the conclusion of 2020, and although I will say that there are some elements of his artistry that could be exploited better than they have been here, the work this player is producing at the moment is nonetheless critical listening for modern avant-gardists everywhere.
Jodi Marxbury