Blue Film is the kind of freshman album that excites the nerves with the thrill of discovery, like The xx’s first album or Pure Heroine, the debut album by New Zealand success story Lorde — with whom Lo-Fang is currently on tour. But Blue Film is a thing apart—and while comparisons are inevitable, the album rides its own heights, suspended deliciously over staccato strings and choppy keys that conjure images of exotic locales. Lo-Fang crafted the heart of Blue Film across several years, traveling in the United States and abroad, with a National Geographic photographer and friend, to places like Cambodia and Iceland, where musical influences surfaced, however subtly, in tracks like “#88” and “Confusing Happiness.”
Despite making an important connection in Lorde, Lo-Fang is the farthest thing from a name-dropping, talentless Gladstone Gander, riding the coattails of others toward success. He’s classically trained as a violinist, for starters. This string-centered specialty is evident on all of Blue Film’s tracks. Though their iridescence comes from the supporting electronica loops and themes, their effervescence explodes from those hints of his classical training. Staccato strings rise from empty spaces that turn the tracks into something complex and folded over, like a kind of theoretical physics model. {Read More}
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