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Jason Urick, "I Love You"
Jason Urick's second full-length for Thrill Jockey is an enigmatic and confounding one, as many elements of his laptop-based soundscapes rival the work of higher-profile kindred spirits like Tim Hecker.  However, his ingenious and unconventional production talents are somewhat undercut by a strange obsessiveness (which extends even to the title, as Urick was fixated on Marco Ferreri's 1986 film of the same name while working on the album).  That curious combination makes for a simultaneously striking and uneasy listening experience.
I think Jason Urick must have a lot of the same software as Daniel Lopatin, as I could easily have been convinced that this was a lost Oneohtrix album when I first put it on.  That unavoidable comparison pretty much smacked me in the face as soon as the weirdly warped and shuddering synthesizers (or voices) came in on "I Love You," but on a deeper aesthetic level, Urick is doing something very divergent from Lopatin or anyone else.  That distinction becomes increasingly noticeable as the album progresses: Urick's pieces tend to involve just one or two key samples or motifs that are enthusiastically stretched, slowed, and processed until they sound thoroughly vibrant, ravaged, blurred, and impossibly thick.
That doesn't mean that these five pieces are simple though—they're very dense, ingeniously textured, and complex in their own way.  It's just that Jason tends to focus all of his creative energies on honing his primary themes into something unnaturally immense and distorted—there isn't too much happening into periphery or any apparent interest in space or dynamic variability.  Such a "maximizing minimalism" approach is a very unusual one, but it is not unsuccessful.  There is a great deal of life and depth to Urick's melodies, as he clearly knows how to craft (or appropriate) a solid hook and is not at all shy about tweaking it into woozily quavering otherness. Also, his forceful, tightly structured presentation make his songs immediately accessible, memorable, and heavy.  The resultant downside, however, is that there aren't terribly many secrets or surprises left to discover with repeat listens.
Notably, there's also an element of the perverse or paradoxical to I Love You, as the songs sound futuristic and processed into oblivion, but they're often built upon recognizably traditional samples.  In fact, on "Ageless Isms," it even sounds like he took an old ballad from the Far East in its entirety and just slowed, pitch-shifted, and generally garbled it into utter unrecognizability.  "Don't Digital" seems to achieve similarly impressive levels of chopped-and-screwedness with an accordion and a fiddle.  I could have that completely wrong though, as Urick's manipulation of his source material is so drastic that it could be almost anything (reggae and dub tend to come up quite a bit as possibilities whenever this album is discussed).
Regardless of where he is borrowing from, I find it conceptually amusing: applying cough medicine-fueled hip-hop tactics to traditional Asian music is just as inspired as using dub tactics to shred dub into utter abstraction.  Still, my favorite pieces are the album's more drone-based book-ends: the title piece and "Syndromes" essentially sound like spaced-out ambient synth music muscled-up to a rumbling and shuddering intensity level. Also, the ghostly, warbling sample (koto?) at the end of "Syndromes" might be the single best thing on the album.
Despite all those great attributes, however, I Love You can be a tough listen.  The album's most significant and fundamental flaw manifests itself most strongly with the candy-colored synth psychedelia of "The Crying Song": Urick's music is so dense, busy, over-processed, and over-saturated that it can be absolutely exhausting to listen to in large doses.  There's no space, nothing natural, no breathing room–just an unrelenting, undulating mass of thick synthetic sounds.  That makes this a very difficult album to love, but it is definitely not a hard one to be impressed by: despite its flaws, I Love You is still one of the most full-on, attention-grabbing abstract electronic albums that I have heard in a while.
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