ODESZA & Yellow House’s Flaws in Our Design: Merely Good Vibes

Artwork from Apple Music

In capturing a “vibe,” many intricacies are necessitated in order to avoid becoming nondescript and negligible background music. Especially in electronic-adjacent genres, this propensity to aim for a “vibe” is often met with derision due to many mainstream failed attempts at what many might consider to be a rather easy feat (a la Funk Wav Bounces, Vol. 2). In the case of ODESZA & Yellow House’s first collaborative effort, they showcase a pretty modest and short-form EP that encapsulates what makes this style work so well for listeners, while also sometimes faltering in the exact same ways many of their stylistic contemporaries do. Flaws in Our Design is an easygoing collection of chilled-out and quite smooth-sailing tracks that quite nicely harken back to modern styles of EDM with that touch of ODESZA’s unique stylings, meshed quite nicely with the idiosyncratic vocal performances from Yellow House-it’s an interesting pairing of collaborators, but, for the most part, it works out quite nicely.

Barring the quite simple and barren introductory track, Flaws’ five main tracks follow a substantially simple set of structuring, compositional, and performative formulas that succeed in varying degrees, mostly towards the later half of the project. This is well-presented on cuts like Heavier or the title track: The former is filled with incredibly spacious layers of low-frequency synths that couple quite nicely with the fragmented spikes of higher-pitched synths towards its back end; it’s a very “classic” EDM motif, but it works out just as nicely in these much calmer, chilled-out contexts. The latter, feeling more urgent and euphony-tinged, is one of the most pronounced uses of Yellow House’s vocals as not only a means to deliver the EP’s continuously superfluous lyrical matter, but also as a tasteful apparatus to deliver melodies that function just as well as the beds of synthesizers and electronics surrounding these cascading walls of chilled-out atmospheres. They make for great multipurpose “vibe” tracks that could fit the warmth of an eccentric summer day out with friends all the way to the harrowing dusks of the winter.

Though outside of those scenarios and the unwritten “prerequisite” for a certain mindset or context, these tracks struggle to feel noteworthy outside of how competently it does its warm, breezy atmospheres. In some cases, they may feel faceless and lack any semblance of bite outside of a handful of passages. Even ODESZA’s propensity for intricately-crafted motifs scattered throughout even the duo’s weaker full-length projects (a la The Last Goodbye) is lacking on many of these tracks. Though, at the very least, the two collaborators have some kind of chemistry going on and, even in the EP’s weakest moments, the tracks still have some kind of emotional affect to them, even if they pale in comparison to the best this style of “vibe” music has to offer (even within this EP or material from its respective collaborators). Each collaborator’s expertise spills over into a short, sweet, but slightly toothless project that would quite nicely fill out dead air better than many projects trying a similar shtick.

RECOMMENDED TRACKS: Heavier, Flaws in Our Design

2023/07/28

Originally published at https://www.tumblr.com on July 28, 2023.