Chet Faker Built on Glass (Downtown) ⋆⋆⋆
The voguish Australian Nick James Murphy, aka Chet Faker, became an overnight sensation after producing a disaffected, shoe-gazey cover of Blackstreet’s No Diggity. This won Faker one of capitalism’s highest honour: inclusion in a Super Bowl half-time advert.
Now comes his long-awaited debut, Built on Glass. It’s a very trendy record with the Aussie crooning over Dam-Funk-edged lounge pop with synthesisers playing soul-inspired melodies.
Faker is pitch-shifted, auto-tuned, and doubles and triples himself in harmony, in a manner familiar to fans of what, at the end of the last decade, was called “future garage”. It’s also clear that the majority of Faker’s sound was culled wholesale from 2010 James Blake’s EPs CMYK and Klavierwerke. There are also traces of fellow critics’ darling Frank Ocean, while the record’s intro sounds almost exactly like Daft Punk’s 2001 track Something About Us.
Things get a bit more complex in the second half after a gravelly voiced American announces that the album has metaphorically been turned over and that you’re listening to the B-side.
Here Faker shows a promising willingness to experiment. 1998 steals the brass synths from the Bloody Beetroots-Vicarious Bliss collaboration Little Stars, before revealing itself to be a delicious – and, unsurprisingly, highly on trend – deep-house track.
Cigarettes and Loneliness has a hook that sounds like a Mumford & Sons chorus stripped of the affected regional accents. Lesson in Patience starts by aping James Blake’s Measurements – an attempt to recreate a gospel choir by layering voices – to which a saxophone and jazz piano duet is added. Blush, the album’s best track – a Bon Iver-esque vocal over a Blake drum pattern, with a curiously RJD2 break in the middle – descends into a back-and-forth between a vocal sample and a techno rhythm before building to laid-back R&B catharsis.
Some of the experimentation comes close to self-indulgence. Creativity doesn’t just involve abandoning simple song structures. You can also use them to write something complex instead. Faker alternates between simplicity and noodling. In this, the contrast with Blake is clear: Blake writes very clever songs.
