Com Truise – In Decay album review

Word of the Day: Spoonerism. The definition? What Com Truise is to Tom Cruise, verbally.

Before I started listening to this brand spankin’ new album from Com Truise, I looked at the ever-instrumental itunes genius recommendations, and I thought, oh, I like most of those people. Among them: Justice, Digitalism, Holy Ghost!, Chromatics, YACHT, blah blah, music that you probably like too, because it’s good.

All of his summer tour dates are in Europe, with the exception of his stop in Chicago, where he will be playing North Coast Festival. If you’ve been to Europe recently, and you went to a festival or a dimly lit underground club/dance floor with a cover, then that might give you an inkling of what this music is about before actually clicking that play button. And if you haven’t done that rather obscure activity (this is more likely) then the music will give you an idea of what the European dimly lit underground dance floor is all about…it works both ways.

My mom or yours might say, “that just sounds like noise to me.”

Seth Haley hails from the electronic music hotbed of upstate New York, where he has been, as he says on his website, “De-thawing in the Jersey sunshine, I compute mid-fi synth-wave, slower-motion funk.” Is that not the most unnecessarily specific-sounding description of one’s own creation that ever happened? Well, to put it simply, no, it’s not. It is not only not overly specific, but it’s right on.

Side note: he is the second person I have ever heard (or read) use the phrase “de-thaw.”

As his description might indicate, Haley knows exactly what he is doing, or making. Only seconds after thinking how the aptly named opening track, “Open” is perfect videogame music, he there came a sample straight out of a video game. This music is the golden age of video game music, where you still got to pick in the settings page whether you wanted mono sound or stereo. Megaman would jam. And I, like Megaman, jammed.

Com Truise brings disparate parts of the sound spectrum and jams them (like Megaman and I) together to make something where the synth waves and the percussion is spotty but there when it needs to be. Each segment of his production feels like a reaction to the last, and the amalgam is so harmoniously chaotic that those actions and reactions kind of make sense.

“Alfa Beach” could have come from an 80s movie, with that electronic drum kit sound and the funky Jim Belushi-on-a-mission high synth high-synthing away, but then it breaks down into something jazzier, with a splashy cymbal. Then, like a reaction to the breakdown, Belushi is running again.

’84 Dreamin’: Aquarium music. Or an intense yoga class. Plus eighties.

Yxes: It’s “sexy” backwards. It confused me for a while, I kept trying to pronounce it in French, like Yves. The sample that goes SEXYYYY in the song pretty much gave it away.

Haley is an artist for a very specific ilk, and if you are within than ilk, you will appreciate this music immensely. On the other hand, this is not pop. Com Truise is not a people pleaser, at least not in this day and age. It is playful but serious in a way that walks the line of nostalgic and envelope-pushing. Keep on de-thawing, Truise. I have some Megaman to play.