Larry Gus: I Need New Eyes

When Panagiotis Melidis, the Greek producer who records as Larry Gus, first began releasing music, his primary mode of expression was parroting other artists to create sample-heavy pastiche. His productions encompassed everything from Afrobeat to hip-hop; after signing to DFA, his first two albums for the label were somewhat unsteady attempts to turn bits and pieces into a cohesive whole, taking cues from prototypical psych pop outfits like El Guincho and Animal Collective. His last album, Years Not Living, was a more conceptually confident (if sometimes muddy-sounding) stew of African-influenced grooves, slathered-on samples, and his own heavily layered vocals.

Though he’s pared down the clutter and clamor somewhat since his initial DFA outing, Melidis is still no stranger to chaos, as evidenced by the mishmash of styles on his new album, I Need New Eyes. Like Years Not Living, it’s made up of immersive grooves and smartly deployed samples. But the music borders on the emotionally drippy, with lyrics lamenting the ever-present fear of failure inherent in creative work—a feeling he describes somewhat cheekily in the album’s first track as a "black veil of fail."

As a writer, Melidis is often either obtuse to the point of sounding glib ("children are all foreign shores") or absurdly abstract ("all the tigers breathe with the fires from above"). He smartly offsets his own straightforward singing with vocal samples from other sources, and his strongest songs piggyback off of other influences: "A Set of Replies" sounds like an earnest adaptation of the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind", elevated by sweetly reedy details and percussive pinging, while the sugary "The Sun Describes", with its warbling vocals and tropical percussion, is a melancholy reimagining of his early Avalanches rip, "Contours Sway".

In some ways Melidis is the consummate consumption-driven producer, whose wide-ranging tastes fuel an obsessive thirst for sounds and ideas: in interviews, he seems comfortable driving the narrative that his music is a sum of influences, gamely referencing Prince, Raymond Queneau, Marc Maron, Lucio Battisti, and Seinfeld. (The album’s title is itself a veiled reference to Proust.) He’s an artist who’s attracted to ambiguity, and who’s attributed one of his most profound moments of inspiration to listening to Madlib while in the grip of sunstroke.

Anyone seeking out that woozy, half-sick, half-euphoric feeling will find it all over I Need New Eyes. The album’s sweeping final track, "Nazgonya (Paper Spike)", is a satisfying culmination, a swirling, unambiguously warm callback to psychedelic pop. Of all the songs on the album, it’s the most straightforward, and therefore the most successful. The problem is that Melidis’ ear for busy atmospherics and his desire to say something deep don’t quite mesh; this music is like that huge spinning wheel on "The Price Is Right"—efficient, colorful, deadening.