If Sober, Skip 'Skiptracing'

Alexander Brettin seems a little cynical. It’s an attitude at odds with the stoner persona he lovingly cultivates for himself; for evidence of this, look no further than the name of his brainchild, Mild High Club, a pun only a pothead could love. He even goes so far as to describe his latest release, “Skiptracing”; in a tweet, “a private reserve shelf bud of a record... its [sic] dense, crystallized, tasty, laughable, layered, hallucinogenic. Novice beware.”

Leaning into the pothead stereotype, Brettin relies on the word “crystallized” often to explain his aim in creating “Skiptracing.” Speaking to music blog Reverb Party, “With ‘Skiptracing,’ I wanted to push the technology to the limit and make an ultra clean record that sounded crystallized at any volume,” he said. It sets “Skiptracing” apart from Mild High Club’s previous effort, “Timeline.” “I felt like ‘Timeline’ was an experiment in simply making a record,” he said. “Timeline” offered a baroque twist on the work of Ariel Pink and Mac Demarco, both of whom conjure up the faded specter of 70s AM rock so that they may murmur ironically over it.

Brettin’s forebears are more variegated than either Pink’s or Demarco’s, and he’s less bashful about the dorky idolatry that fuels his music. Both of these qualities served him well on “Timeline,” but he fully gives rein to them on “Skiptracing,” preoccupied with seamlessly synthesizing his inspirations: “the full discography of Steely Dan, ‘Breakfast in America’ by Supertramp, ‘Skylarking’ by XTC, ‘Holding You, Loving You’ by Don Blackman, and ‘The Pavilion of Dreams’ by Harold Budd.” Playing “spot-the-influence” with most artists is idle work, but pastiche takes on a remarkable primacy in Mild High Club’s music. “Nothing is truly original anymore… I believe it’s a melting pot of what you’ve acquired,” he said. True or not, it’s a bleak statement, one that makes Brettin come across as rather defeated and prompts the question: What now?

If “Skiptracing” is the answer, not a whole lot. “Skip tracing” is “the process of locating a fugitive that cannot be found at their place of residence or usual hangouts,” and sure enough, the album (allegedly) centers on tracing the development of American music. Given this premise, one might expect “Skiptracing” to be a thrilling odyssey through a plethora of diverse musical periods. It’s not. For an album that purports to be a journey, “Skiptracing” is startlingly inert. Brettin plucks so many disparate styles from their contexts and homogenizes them, draining them of their life and color. The end product is smooth and inoffensive but also painfully dull.

Brettin’s lyrics provide no way out either: In keeping with the plot, they are onanistically all about music itself. “Someone wrote this song before and I could tell you where it’s from,” he lazily croons on “Homage,” before explicitly pointing out the chord progression of the verse. On the title track he sings, “this tonality doesn’t disagree, ought to be chromatically pleasing me,” his vocals rarely rising above a sigh. The title track makes for a promising opening: When the loopy guitar solo drifts in after the cowbell-laden bossa nova chorus, the song approaches the sublime. Yet the rest of the album fails to build on its strong start, choosing instead to grow more diffuse and indistinct. “Whodunit” breaks up the monotony, with frenzied drums that skitter around claustrophobic ambient swells, but its function seems to be to clear out a room—to scare off anyone expecting a reversal in the remaining ten minutes. The next track, “Chasing My Tail,” dawdles to such an extent that one can barely detect a melody, and all that the last substantial track, “Chapel Perilous,” has to show for its existence is a bizarre interpolation of “When You Wish Upon A Star.”

It is tough to tell where Brettin went wrong. Admittedly, his “melting pot” approach did not seem like it would yield anything spectacular, and his focus on presentation rather than content was risky. Whatever the case, “Skiptracing” lacks vibrancy, consistency, and cohesion. It works well as background noise or something to space out to. But taken in one sober, attentive sitting, the tone of “Skiptracing” feels like slowly descending in a busted elevator that can still pump in muzak. The skip it ends up tracing is a point to its proceedings, a reason for it to have been created in the first place, and it comes out empty-handed. The album’s conclusion is telling: “Skiptracing (Reprise)” merely slows down the first few seconds of the title track and superimposes its bass line over street noise. We’re right where we started—probably because we’ve been ambling in place the whole time.