Washed Out - Purple Noon

This is perhaps the closest Washed Out has ever been to his namesake. While his trademark layered vocal style and ‘80s influence makes ‘Purple Noon’ unmistakably his own, in almost every other regard he’s shifted his sound to something more restrained, more elusive and more fragile. At its core, funk is replaced by reflective ennui, updating the sound to something like Joji, or even the vaporwave texture of Luxury Elite. This is a much slower, more repetitive album, and given the equally limited scope of the lyrics, it’d be easy to dismiss it as the same song ten times. But when the drums on ‘Paralyzed’ lean more towards Timbaland than Underworld, or the jazzy Van Morrison chords of ‘Game Of Chance’ are played by the only obvious guitar on the album, it draws the ear to the slight shift, inviting you to delve deeper into its layered patchwork of sounds. The album proves to be a glacial melt of shimmering beauty, asking for attention and rewarding it with a kind of zen.