Dan Friel: Life

The sound Dan Friel has created is so uniquely specific, it's easy to oversimplify: distorted nursery-rhyme melodies over cracked drum-machine beats. But dig just a little below the surface and there's a lot more going on. At various points Friel evokes noise, industrial, punk crossed with techno, video games, even jazz. On Life, his fourth full-length, he covers that range more thoroughly than ever, which perhaps explains the album's all-encompassing title. Pretty much his entire musical existence is locked in these grooves.

The title might also refer to the fact that Friel has literally created life—this is the first album he's recorded since his son Wolf was born in 2013. Friel's music has always had childlike qualities, but here he makes that connection explicit. He opens with a sweet, woozy jingle called "Lullaby (For Wolf)", following later with the even-more sugary "Theme", which could pass for an outtake from Raymond Scott's Soothing Sounds for Baby. The warped, off-speed crunch of "Sleep Deprivation" would fit on any Friel album, but pinning its title to parenthood reveals how well his music captures the half-awake fog of early child-rearing.

The rest of Life may not be about kids, but every track contains some simple melodic nugget that any toddler would happily hum along to. The best songs revel in that anthemic innocence, particularly the catchy "Cirrus", an immediate earworm on the level of Friel's 2012 insta-classic "Valedictorian". The two title tracks are nearly as memorable, though a lot more abrasive, ringing with distortion and bullet-like fuzz blasts. 

But again, hearing Friel through a single thematic prism is unwise. Some sections in Life sound like hip-hop bathed in nitrogen, or even like lost Bomb Squad beats. Friel's way of taking his melodies off on tangents evokes jazz solos; his obsession with gritty texture gives some pieces, like the clanging "Bender", the musique concrète feel of a busy construction site. And for all its machinistic beats, Life can also sound like a sloppy punk band rattling basement walls. That's especially true during "Jamie (Luvver)", Friel's wordless cover of a Joanna Gruesome song, which gives the already-energetic original a huge shot of late-night caffeine.

What unites all the styles in Friel's sonic fryer is playful momentum. His main instrument, a Yamaha Portasound keyboard, is literally a toy, and throughout Life it sounds like he's rolling around on the floor. Most of his songs include a constant whirr, and leave you with the echo of that eternal buzz—an effect that I imagine is a mirror of Friel's bleeping brain. Give Life some time and you might find it infecting your synapses, too.