The Anticon label is a deepy peculiar animal. Around the turn of the millennium, its core members – going by names like Boom Bip, Doseone, cLOUDdEAD, Jel and So-Called Artists – took a nerdy yet intensely psychedelic approach to hip hop, and ended up creating a woozy and out-there sound that prefigured a huge amount of currently hip music. Now that the appallingly named new shifts in stoner music - “glo-fi” and “chillwave” - are opening up the territory between indie and hip hop/dance again, Anticon seems hugely prescient, but with new artists like Son Lux, it seems the label is once again ahead of the pack.
We Are Rising does exist in that same indie-dance hinterland as new acts like Washed Out and Toro Y Moi – but its ambitions seem like they extend way beyond building blog buzz. There's a huge prog-pop drama to the whole thing that brings to mind no less than the Electric Light Orchestra, and hooks to match, no matter how weird proceedings get. It's not surprising to discover that guest musicians on the album have played with Sufjan Stevens, as there's much of his sense of impeccably orchestrated scale.
Sadly there's a little of Stevens's archness too, but it rears its head rarely: mostly, this record's thrills are gloriously straightforward, even as its methods are exploratory and off-beam.
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