Album Review: Tycho – Weather

On Weather, Tycho’s fifth studio LP, the group has fallen under the spell of an utterly anonymous LA voice going by Saint Sinner (*longest sigh imaginable*), who has penned “lyrics” and offered her services on no less than five of the eight tracks on the album. The tranquil, digital mystic vibe Scott Hansen’s group is known for has been ground into a paste and diluted into what amounts to LaCroix essence, leaving us with a weak facsimile of Fashion Channel muzak that influencers will no doubt froth over. Hansen has stated that this was “a vision of [his] since the beginning: to incorporate the most organic instrument of all, the human voice”. Unfortunately, they chose an aggressively ordinary human voice.

Hansen’s patience and diligence are all over the slick production, as standard, but there’s no soul here, no life behind the listless plucking of his electric guitar strings, no sense of reverence behind the found-sound samples he deploys. It’s quite beautiful, but vapid, and despite finally offering something inspiring and absorbing in the closing title track, the album sinks into oblivion. It’s a cruel last salvo as it’s crisp and exciting, a drive up a sunlit coastal highway to clear one’s head, its peaks and valleys full of competing digital and analogue details culminating in an invigorating song that represents precisely what’s great about Tycho’s music. Oh well.