By Louis Pattison
By Louis Pattison
Nikolaj Vonsild is best known as the frontman of electropop group When Saints Go Machine , whose second album Konkylie made a splash in their native Denmark on its release back in 2011 . His new trio Khalil retains some of his main group ’ s hallmarks . This is bright , synthetic music drawn in digital textures , with Vonsild ’ s yearning falsetto pushed right to the fore . Yet Khalil feels harder to categorize than his parent band . Released on the underground Danish imprint Posh Isolation , their debut album The Water We Drink takes a fluid approach to arrangement and song structure , its electronic washes and hyperprocessed vocals right at the verge of dissolving into abstraction .
In places , The Water We Drink recalls the so-called “ bubblegum industrial ” music of label co-founder Loke Rahbek ’ s Croatian Amor , for instance . Khalil , though , balance their experimental tendencies by engaging with the broader realm of pop music . Production comes courtesy Vonsild , Villads Klint , and Simon Formann the latter of whom played in the Copenhagen post-punk group Lower , and whose current solo project Yen Towers prefigures Khalil ’ s tensile club rhythms and skittery sound design . But all that stands secondary to Vonsild ’ s voice . His vocal is placed front and center , drenched in Auto-Tune , lending it an alien vibrato or freezing it into unnatural leaps and pirouettes . The first time you hear it you think of Drake or the Kanye of 808s & Heartbreak , and what at first feels like an impulsive comparison slowly gains weight as the album unfolds . “ Rest My Head Against a Wall of Water ” and “ Sculpture No Solid ” are possessed of that distinctly Drakeian confection of preening vanity , romantic angst , and sad-boy rapture .
This sense of permeable boundaries is a hallmark of the project . On the cover , a plastic water bottle drains its contents into a pair of cupped hands — a juxtaposition of the natural and the man-made that feels heavy with meaning . The branding of bottled water implies cleanliness and purity , but the reality is heaving landfills and oceans choked with plastic , environmental apocalypse smuggled in under the benign corporate language of hygiene , health , and well-being .
This conflicted spirit finds its way into the very fabric of The Water We Drink ; even as its artificial textures convey an effervescent euphoria , something darker and more damaged drifts just beneath the surface . “ Submit So Deep ” and “ Estate Straight Line ” recall the mutant bass experiments of Rabit , or the more eerie recesses of vaporwave ; on the latter , shuddering sub bass and glitching vocal samples coalesce into a disorientating sonic fog . Elsewhere , Khalil reach for moments of febrile intensity . On the closing “ The White Hoodie I Wear Because I Love You ,” the electronics recede into the background and Vonsild ’ s voice is left to spin and whirl madly , as if being eaten up by the intensity of its own emotion . Here , in particular , I ’ m reminded of the glossy trauma of ANOHNI ’ s HOPELESSNESS , another album on which beauty and horror are closely entwined .
A few years back , Posh Isolation ’ s stock in trade was dour post-punk and arty power electronics . The idea of the label releasing a record drawing on contemporary hip-hop modes would have been , to put it mildly , unlikely . But The Water We Drink is a porous record for an increasingly porous age , one in which lines of influence or provenance mean little , so long as you ’ ve got engaging sounds and smart concepts to tie everything together . Khalil certainly bring both to the table on a record that feels like soul music for our times .
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