Cast

Albumbeschreibung

The debut solo album from Tobiasz Biliński (aka Perfect Son), 2019's Cast finds the Polish musician digging deep into his darkly textured brand of progressive electronic rock. Co-produced by Biliński and Marcin Buźniak with additional production by Jeff Zeigler (Kurt Vile, the War on Drugs), the album has a cinematic slow burn that often feels like a goth-rock opera circa 1988. Prior to recording Cast, Biliński pursued a dual trajectory, playing in the experimental trio Kyst, as well as the synthy, '80s-influenced Coldair. Although his work as Perfect Son hews much closer to Coldair, with Cast he seems to have struck a balance between the two projects, crafting songs that combine his penchant for gargantuan tsunami keyboard waves, reverberant bass, and icy programmed beats, with more organic underpinnings like crystalline grand piano, guitar, and actual drums. These are doomy, bass-heavy arrangements, rife with layers of orchestrated sounds that build and swell with a sustained dramatic tension. Think Matthew Dear meets The Downward Spiral-era NIN and you'll get a good sense of the grayscale atmosphere Biliński has achieved here. At the center is his yearning croon, a style which brings to mind a mix of Depeche Mode, James Blake, and even Cardinal's Eric Matthews, albeit with less of a Baroque psychedelic angle and more of an electro-goth bent. Tracks like "Lust," "It's Life," and "My Body Wants" have a rolling kineticism that sounds like '80s Giorgio Moroder on allergy meds. Elsewhere, cuts like "Reel Me," "High Hopes, and "Wax" are post-club ballads that shimmer like black pearls.

© Matt Collar /TiVo