2019

The decade is ending and we still have lots to do. Many of us entered our careers in this decade and a lot of us are trying to unlearn the internalized compliance that’s been programmed into us, in furtherance of the American Dream. People my age are industry now, so remember, the goal is to always be optimizing. 

This is easier said than done as modern life creates a friction between expectations and ourselves. Indeed, it’s getting harder to “be” in a world that demands more time from us—so Lyft home, Blue Apron that dinner, Wayfair that ottoman. It’s only time, money and attention. Do things. Move fast. Party harder. Relentless. 

The crash appears inevitable. It’s no wonder the buzz around mindfulness has reached fever pitch. We’re tired of feeling tired but the effort to stay afloat feels impossible.

Oso Oso’s basking in the glow comes at the right time then—a record exploring the small moments of pause that just might allow us to hang on to who we are. Riding the hype and wave from 2017’s excellent the yunahon mixtape, basking… finds solo artist Jade Lilitri taking on the possibility that self-care might just be a desperation cocktail of black humor, unwavering gratitude, and compassion for our past mistakes as we all reach for a sense of where we want to be. What results is a concise 10-track collection of hopeful meditations, oscillating between the left-field emo-pop of Saves the Day, the sincerity of The Hotelier, and the softer grace of pre-cancellation Brand New.

While the yunahon mixtape featured the charm of Lilitri’s one-man DIY grit, basking… now features the Midas touch of producer Mike Sapone, the George Martin of 3rd/4th Wave Emo. For that reason, basking… feels like it’s been fortified by sunlight, which you can feel firsthand on the rippling waves of “intro” to the driving power-pop and soaring harmonies of “the view.” These tracks gleam and shimmer, presenting a real warmth that matches the hope Lilitri is trying to channel. He transfigures this feeling on the album’s title track, aching for something outside himself and reaching for restorative absolution:

These days, it feels like all I know is this phase
I hope I'm basking in the glow
And these days, it feels like all I know is this phase
I hope I'm basking in the glow
Is there something bigger I don't know?

Elsewhere, on “dig,” Lilitri is torn between the fear of facts and the prison of fiction as the song dissolves into a sugar bath of angular distortion:

Hard to know what you've been shown
When all you're shown are lies
Black ink put on this page, above a dotted line
Oh, oh
Oh, oh

Yeah, there's this hole in my soul
So how far do you wanna go?
You know I'll give it away if it's what you say
This hold, it grows, can you feel it too?
I mean if that's what you want
It's up to you

A sense of searching permeates throughout basking…, positing that the way out into the light is right through our obstacles. For its generally summer-obsessed aesthetic, basking… doesn’t shy away from the shadows that often fall along our journey of self-discovery. The underwater-mixtape acoustic strum of “one sick plan” finds Lilitri face to face with his undoing, gambling on self-reliance in the face of total annihilation. “priority change” finds Lilitri shedding the notion that being responsible for others’ well-being is the same as setting an example for positive change:

Not quite a saint nor a sinner
So don't bother saving no souls
And with each year these roads get thinner
Don't fear walking them alone

Fearless optimism isn’t anything new for emo in 2019—especially in light of some of 2019s heaviest hitters (Origami Angel’s spasmodic guitar heroics on Somewhere City, the sc-fi doo-wop of Prince Daddy & the Hyena’s fuzzed out Cosmic Thrill Seekers come to mind). basking…, however, takes the approach that it’s not always full steam ahead, boundless energy, and relentless awe at the possibility of living one’s most excellent life. We’re not the Avengers, we’re people, and basking… reflects that struggle with gracious restraint. There are peaks and valleys in our paths and the albums’ back half maintains a sublime exploration of both. “impossible game” might be the album’s pièce de résistance, a jerky, flange-soaked track that finds Lillitri’s falsetto flip from slacker dreams to zen master under a Jimmy Eat World-sized chorus:

So slow down, feels like we're rushing away
Tried my hold on to this impossible game
And I know I'm wrong, what else can I say?
I got a glimpse of this feeling, I'm trying to stay in that lane

It’s a refreshing take on “trust the process,” but a fervent reminder that we shouldn’t blindly follow some abstraction of bliss. Lilitri bets on a cultivating a meaningful life through self-reliance on our values, from what’s true for ourselves, to be the best version of ourselves. You can’t rush that sort of thing as time and experience are the greatest teachers, but Lilitri gives us the benefit of that hindsight—as well as a strong case for all sage advice to come with a side of twisting guitar lines and two-step drums.

basking… closes with the haunting “charlie” which chronicles the bittersweet end of a relationship, building from twinkling melodies and dusty shuffles towards stutter-stop explosions. Unlike most break-up songs that devolve into this notion that the departed can’t be replaced, Lilitri subverts that trend with the idea that there’s something inevitable about departure, and the thing we miss most is a memory of a feeling. The song provides the perfect capstone for basking…, that we acknowledge grief in the practice of letting go but that we eventually have to disconnect from its stasis if we’re to survive any meaningful change. Ending with a gossamer solo and gauzy keyboards, “charlie” presents Oso Oso at its most vital, displaying for its listeners that simply having the freedom to choose “meaning” versus “comfort” isn’t enough to guarantee happiness. You don’t always have to be brave but you do need conviction to keep going.

Ultimately, basking… leaves us all with the notion that our lives contain infinite possibilities if we’d slow down long enough to realize them. We often get caught up in the game of going further, being better, and living up to the expectations of others, which often means we are the instrument of our own suffering. With basking…, Oso Oso reminds us that maybe, if we quietly listen to ourselves and trust our values, the race we’re running isn’t worth running in the first place. Sometimes, it’s better to take a second and slow down to unlearn what we have learned about the world and about ourselves. 

Maybe we’ll come to find there’s less to do than we originally thought, leaving more time for the things that truly matter.

In addition to basking in the glow, here are my other favorite releases from 2019:

• American Football | American Football (LP3) (Polyvinyl / Big Scary Monsters)
• Angel Olsen | All Mirrors (Jagjaguwar)
• Bad Books | III (Loma Vista)
• Bat For Lashes | Lost Girls (AWAL Recordings)
• Better Oblivion Community Center | Better Oblivion Community Center (Dead Oceans)
• blink-182 | NINE (Viking Wizard Eyes)
• Blood Incantation | Hidden History of the Human Race (Dark Descent)
• Bon Iver | i,i (Jagjaguwar)
• Chelsea Wolfe | Birth of Violence (Sargent House)
• Chillhop Music | Daydreams 2 (Chillhop Music)
• Drab Majesty | Modern Mirror (Dais Records)
• Freddie Gibbs & Madlib | Bandana (Keep Cool / RCA Records)
• Gatecreeper | Deserted (Relapse)
• Greet Death | New Hell (Deathwish)
• Hania Rani | Esja (Gondwana)
• James Blake | Assume Form (Polydor)
• The Japanese House | Good at Falling (Dirty Hit / Interscope)
• La Dispute | Panorama (Epitaph)
• The National | I Am Easy To Find (4AD)
• Orville Peck | Pony (Sub Pop)
• Oso Oso | basking in the glow (Triple Crown)
• Origami Angel | Somewhere City (Chatterbot Records)
• Prince Daddy & The Hyena | Cosmic Thrill Seekers (Counter Intuitive)
• PUP | Morbid Stuff (Rise / BMG)
• (Sandy) Alex G | House of Sugar (Domino)
• Sharon Van Etten | Remind Me Tomorrow (Jagjaguwar)
• Speilbergs | This is Not the End (By The Time It Gets Dark)
• Sturgill Simpson | Sound & Fury (Elektra)
• Tyler, The Creator | IGOR (Columbia)
• Venom Prison | Samsara (Prosthetic)

Originally published December 31, 2019 on Tumblr.