Even before the ongoing coast-to-coast exodus, Los Angeles has always held a mythic allure to New Yorkers. To a nearly surreal extent, every meaningful aspect of living in New York is inverted there, like some kind of Gulliver's Travels opposite-land paradise–a place of endless cars and infinite residential square footage, where generalized anxiety is something to be worked on rather than bragged about and people seem to enjoy going to bed at a reasonable hour.
Despite all the breathless endorsements from transplants that swear that they've never felt so good before, L.A. does have a substantial dark side–a populace dealing with PTSD after years of gang violence compounded by police violence, the reactionary paranoia wafting in from Orange County, its ongoing ecological disaster. It's a place where you can stand in the window of a multimillion dollar loft downtown and gaze out over an ephemeral shanty town that blooms and evaporates daily, cocktail in hand, feeling like nothing so much as a sci-fi villain.
After producing a convincingly jittery, grimy portrait of late-Bloomberg New York on 2013's NYC, Hell 3:00 AM, James Ferraro has accomplished a similar likeness of his adopted hometown Los Angeles with its follow-up, Skid Row. It comes as no surprise that his L.A. album is short on sunshine and mellow vibes, and long on looming existential dread. There's not much of New L.A. in his portrait, no bohemian Brooklyn expats chillaxing in a pleasant new climate. Ferraro's L.A. is a dystopian vision stitched together from its drought-stricken everyone's-a-reality-show present and the bad old '90s, where the riots, the OJ trial, and the LAPD's corrupt culture blurred together to cast an ominous shadow on the city's carefully cultivated image.
His urban pessimism remains undulled–as does his passion for oppressively ugly recording techniques–but Ferraro's switched up some of his musical approach. While Hell 3:00 AM sounded like a nightmare version of contemporary R&B, Skid Row does something similar with L.A.'s native funk styles, which have recently been revived in less bleak ways by the likes of Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar.
Ferraro's take on funk strips away all of its organic sensuality and joy, leaving a creepy husk that's still fascinating to inspect. "White Bronco", which kicks off the record after one of the computer-generated spoken word introductions that have become something of a Ferraro trademark–this one featuring a pair babbling about gated communities and "burning Priuses on the highway" and conducting a transaction for an iced latte–slows a slow-jam groove down even slower until it sounds eerily narcotized and its minimalist synth bass riff takes on a menacing aspect. Ferraro's monotone listing of facts from the Nicole Brown Simpson murder trial mixed in with samples of TV news surrounding the Rodney King beating conflate the two sensational acts of violence like someone who's either heavily intoxicated or just suffered a head injury. At the two-thirds point of the song, Ferraro hits a vocal lick that sounds like Snoop's "'G' Thang" flow, and it feels like some kind of sick punchline.
Ferraro's freer with hooks on Skid Row than he was on Hell 3:00 AM, and there are songs like "Thrash Escalate" and "Rhinestones" that sound like they could slap if they were sped up a few percent. He might be starting to come to terms with his innate pop talents, or it could just be a new tactic of dispensing hints of traditional pop pleasures into the gloom to keep his audience off balance.
Skid Row isn't really about those singular moments though, or about walking away from it with a hook stuck in your head. They're just elements in a solidly built cohesive whole that feels like a J.G. Ballard novel filtered through late-night Ableton sessions, and a worthy addition to the long line of punk albums about Los Angeles that render it as a city built on fantasy with a nihilistic streak that runs to its core.
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