BOOTS - AQUΛRIA

From scraping by for years with no direction, sleeping in a camper van, to finding himself, within a matter of months, on the list of the most in-demand underground producers around: the story of Jordan Asher – aka Boots – embodies the American dream that rewards hard work and persistence to the letter. And Boots is certainly someone who grinds away, even as he comes across as a nervous, obsessive type with a desperate need to make his own voice heard in a world where noise has taken over, and he's well aware that it all hinges on a razor-thin line separating him from the abyss. For years he amassed something like 100,000 samples on hard disk, cataloguing them all according to his own personal logic. The result: depressed, slurred surrealist lyrics laid over sickly collages of electronics, industrial noise and pulsing r&b and trip-hop rhythms.

All this, until the moment of his mysterious breakthrough, about which he himself refuses to give too many details. Legend has it that one evening, while working the coat check at a club, Boots received an invitation to take part in the recording sessions for the new album of an unnamed, internationally famous popstar, who had apparently been struck by some of his demos (after getting hold of them... how?). What's certain is that the contact was an agent from Jay Z's Roc Nation, and the unnamed popstar would turn out to be none other than Beyoncé Knowles. Okay, you don't have to believe this little Cinderella story, but there's little to argue with when it comes to Boots's contribution to the remarkable "Beyoncé", and naturally the praise and the multi-million sales that followed ended up launching his name across the blogosphere too.

After such a breakthrough, Boots kept a low profile, first releasing the striking mixtape "WinterSpringSummerFall", which nonetheless featured well-known names on the scene such as Kelela and the Jeremih/Shlohmo pairing, and then the soundtrack to a short film he directed himself, the EP "Motorcycle Jesus". More recently he hasn't passed up the chance to work with Run The Jewels and to lend a hand on "M3LL155X" by a red-hot FKA Twigs, and it all seems to be part of a calculated master plan: indeed, his latest collaborations sound like groundwork for "AQUΛRIA", by far the darkest, most claustrophobic and industrial work Boots has put his hand to so far.

The opening of "Brooklyn Gamma" certainly makes you prick up your ears; the title track (featuring Deradoorian) is a viscous jam that oozes out of the speakers like black pitch. Further on, the oblique electro atmospheres of "Earthquake" at times recall the Brainfeeder house sound (the label run by Flying Lotus), but "Only" even stirs up Radiohead – that piano/drums combo seems to draw on the ever-lingering "Pyramid Song".

As a studio maestro, Boots places obsessive care on the sound, using every resource at his disposal to craft a sticky, viscous magma and stamp it with his own mark, but the songwriting and, above all, the vocal delivery—always teetering between spoken word and a mournful kind of singing—doesn't always manage to lift off the ground. Numb and vaguely detached from human contact, "AQUΛRIA" also makes for a heavy, listless listen; tracks like "Oraclies" and "Bombs Away" bounce around a whirlwind of obsessive industrial samples that almost bring to mind "Third" by Portishead, but the emotional charge stays dormant. "I Run Roulette" and "Dead Come Running" tangle themselves up in claustrophobic rhythms and a heavy dose of lo-fi vocoder. It's almost a relief, in short, to reach the end and let your ears rest on the fizzy guitars of "Still".

If his fellow artist The Weeknd has proven he has the voice and personality to make the leap from the console to the microphone, Boots still seems to retain the persona of the low-key beatmaker, albeit an excellent one. "AQUΛRIA" indeed works better as a production palette than as an album in its own right, a sort of sonic cheat-sheet that, when put to proper use—as on Mrs. Carter's record—can yield thrilling results. But when it isn't backed by the right human counterpart, the whole thing tends to collapse into a swirl of disjointed lyrics and anemic wailing that grows monotonous over time, and these flaws are laid particularly bare by Boots's own songwriting, since he still writes songs in the traditional sense of the word and can't hide behind the more forgiving veil of abstraction and the avant-garde.

Be that as it may, Boots retains a sound and an aesthetic all his own that set him apart from the crowd, and even if it's not entirely up to him, let's hope his contributions to the world of music aren't over yet.

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09/12/2015