James Krivchenia Collages the Unwatched Beauty of YouTube on Blood Karaoke

Opening track “Emissaries of Creation” catalyzes the entire record’s gist: a dance floor falling into a black hole. Beneath the terror of the song’s swarming static are irresistible grooves just waiting to be released. Krivchenia’s strongest trait as a world-builder is his ability to conceptualize restraint. Where his first record, You’re Useless, I Love You (Reading Group, 2016), was a gorgeous rush of intoxicating pop mutations, Blood Karaoke is a nervous, epic downward spiral of the weird, wonderful and forgotten poetry of social media. “Calendrical Rot” merges beautiful piano arrangements, background conversations and talk-box melodies, with a heavenly hum gliding atop it.

But it’s the record’s centerpiece, “The Science of Imaginary Solutions,” that becomes Krivchenia’s most brash, screaming juggernaut. The track sounds like a group of people on fire, with a lone, warped microphone bubbling amidst the chaos. Instrumental music always faces the challenge of transcribing emotions and harnessing resonance exclusively through sound, and Krivchenia articulates joy in the buoyant “Culture Complex” by transforming glittering synths into a pacing, cheering crowd. Instead of taking apart the stems of record crate gems, Krivchenia’s sampling offers access to the most underpopulated parts of the internet to create auditory memories. “God In Every Way” is pulsating, hardcore techno; album closer “Wall Facer” initially tracks as an industrial stalwart before winding down into a lush, atmospheric finale for a complex, meticulously constructed project.

Krivchenia’s sonic moveset is one of poetic, deliberate, skittering impulses, just like Big Thief’s. But Blood Karaoke takes his band’s curious, earthly blueprint and uses it to render a perfect composite of what our own phone-obsessed apocalypses could be beyond that: epileptic dancing on the edge of sharp, mangled, A.I.-generated thunderstorms. The record plays like a timely coda to the last two years, emphasizing how absorbed we are in our own fabricated personas, almost to the point that we are tethered to a machine that has become unrecognizable. That’s the beauty of sampling and collaging, how its muddied, sometimes claustrophobic presentation is a mirror of our own fixations, and Krivchenia admirably immerses himself in all of the chaos.

Matt Mitchell is a writer living in Columbus, Ohio. His writing can be found now, or soon, in Pitchfork, Bandcamp, Paste, LitHub and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter @matt_mitchell48.