A lot of words have popped up to describe the trending penchant to flood ears with a sound so oversaturated that it drips beads of sunshine. Chillwave, chill-house, glo-fi, no-fi and even hypnagogic pop have all been pegged to describe bands that create a wall of fuzz to keep an arm around almost childishly adventurous hooks. But what makes Brooklyn-based Small Black's Small Black EP such a milestone is how the band manages to escape the overtly pretentious tags and formulate purified pop music that compartmentalizes all of the genre's more off-putting tendencies.
Firmly entrenched in Sonic Youth-heavy shoegaze, chillwave's haze and wall of separation often manifests itself like the sun's distorting effects on photography. Their sound jams more light than an earbud can reasonably contain, and the groups have too much DIY zeal to partake in a higher production platform to clear up the rattle and hum. But Small Black don't go to such lengths to ostracize their listeners. They treat their fuzzy aesthetics like a winter jacket, meant to ease the familiarity process moreso than create a barrier.
Part of that stems from the band's earnest musicianship. Where many of their chillwave brethren overstate their roughshod accomplishments with precise aesthetics, Small Black thrive on understating their own talent. They have found the saturation point in the medium, and spread their instrumentals to a comfortable moisture, pulling the reigns before things get too slippery.
There is a lot of room to get lost behind the cloak of distortion, but Small Black avoid dissonance by defining themselves as a unit. And while much of the chillwave movement likely won't prosper through music's increasingly receding half-life, Small Black show promise in that they don't seem intimidated by the spacious terrain in front of them. Even though their debut comes impressively matured, there is enough room to explore and enough uncoiled energy that their well of ideas resembles the Fountain of Youth. So while the words critics use to pinpoint their sound may be ubiquitous and off-point, by the time they release their full-length debut later this year, they might have defined the confusion themselves.
