Lapland is one bearded bloke called Josh Mease who lives in New York. He makes his music in his home studio. That’s the back story and it’s not a good one, especially in an age when a voracious variety of media demand a narrative to go with their music. Mease isn’t a desperate visionary, living on the edge of his sanity, nor is he a photogenic teenager making music to honour a relation dying of cancer, nor is he anything in between. In point of fact, we don’t know much about what he is. All we have is a luscious set of songs comprising the loveliest album 2014 has yet produced.
If Lapland recall anything it’s the high days of chill-out music, a lazy style that developed in the 1990s for listening to on Balearic beaches on ecstasy or late at night after returning from nightclubs, a music woozy with its own cuteness, as with the gorgeous Air (when at their best). Lapland, however, only has a toe dipped in this. What makes his music work is the ability to construct knock-out songs, somewhere between Fleetwood Mac and Burt Bacharach, albeit through the prism of light psychedelia. They are joyful things, smeared with gentle haziness. Sometimes, as on “Memory”, they have a touch of George Harrison’s most spaced Beatles numbers (think “Blue Jay Way”) but at others the listener is dragged off to pleasing, oddball terrain redolent of a David Lynch dream sequence, as on the waltzing instrumental “Fountains”.
The whole thing benefits from the sweetest melodic guitar work - twangy background odysseys, country fret-work or neat acoustic picking – but, again, that’s only the icing on the cake. What makes Lapland an essential album is that, whether the listener is fan of film soundtracks, exotic electronica, Seventies singer-songwriters, Sixties pop or cheesy easy – or a whole host of other styles - there’s an absolute banquet to get stuck into here.
Overleaf: watch the video for "Where Did It Go?"