Serene, deliberate, and reassuring, ADR’s sophomore release feels less like a follow-up and more like a deepening.
Alessandra De Rossi’s second album as ADR – ‘de-re-al-i-za-tion,’ out via Lilystars Records today – feels less like a follow-up and more like a deepening. If her first record ‘Adrift’ was, as she put it, “[her] tinkering with GarageBand,” this one finds her surrounded by musicians who “willingly helped the music sound more organic.”
The result is a collection of immersive, slow-burn pieces that prioritize mood over immediacy, often with little regard to pop tropes of length and economy. “I’ve been warned about writing long songs,” she says, “but thank heavens my songs don’t have choruses.”
The opening track, “Mindswept,” is reminiscent of “Frozen”-era Madonna in timbre and tenor – both musical and emotional – and it envelopes the listener in its fluidity, its very loose rendering of form. “Swept Away” takes the same tact and sensibility. Whether by design or circumstance, it becomes clear that Alex has always meant for this record to be a sort of variations-on-a-theme release rather than an anthology of easily digestible singles.
(To paraphrase, they’re well-crafted meals, not snacks.)
A sense of multiplicity reveals itself in the interplay between “Glares” and “Delivered,” a pair of tunes that highlight the able and adept hands of frequent collaborators Chris Valera on synths and JP Verona, who programmed drums and bass (and also helmed the mixing boards for several tracks). “Glares” is more free-form, a textural sketch, if you may, while “Delivered” has a more deliberate structuredness that lends Alex’s emotive scribbles the dynamism of a well-played-out narrative. Louie Talan plays boss-level bass on it, too.
“Out of You” is more rhythmic than the rest of the flow-y fare that permeates ‘de-re-al-i-za-tion.’ JayJay Lozano’s Moog offers a sweet counterpoint to Valera’s keys, and Alex’s phrasing is more involved, more affective, and everything crescendos alongside Verona’s increasingly propulsive drum layers.
If there was one cut that oddly qualifies as danceable in this otherwise contemplative record – never mind that it does so in stop-and-go bursts – it would have to be “Sea of Pain.”
Thematically, Alex plays with tumult and torrent in ‘de-re-al-i-za-tion,’ but execution-wise her songs tend to act as balm: as calm waters that may have seen and experienced a violent undertow but are now ushering in better, more peaceful times.
“The Storm,” incidentally, marks that shift. Kettle Mata lends his talents on guitar and bass, while the talented Pat Tirano, as on many other tracks, mans the mixing boards.
Toward the end, “The Run” and “?” remain moody but always pivoting to rousing resolve. Then comes “Always Almost,” the most stripped-down of the bunch, basically a guitar-and-voice arrangement featuring Verona on guitar. It’s a brave proposition, really, given Alex’s self-effacing appraisal of her own singing voice.
“‘Oh, another one – and it’s the weird one, too!’” she told me for an NME story I did for ‘Adrift’ some time back, alluding to actresses who inexplicably launch music careers out of the blue – herself included.
Though Alex I think is a vocal revelation (despite her quirky protestations), her assemblage of name producers and musicians – which incidentally also includes Kjwan’s Marc Abaya on guitar and backing vocals in a few tracks – lends the record not so much a patina of credibility but a necessary organic pulse.
The final tracks, “A Melody of Malady” and “In Your Own Skin,” aren’t cut from some mid-2000s shoegaze or chillwave cookie mold; they’re closer to episodic pop soundscapery that isn’t desperate or overly sentimental. If anything, it’s “senti-mental”: an artistic grappling with things that are visceral. In other words, they’re melodies that soothe us through maladies.
Alex originally wanted to call the record ‘Heavy Endings,’ “because all the tracks end with long instrumentals, sometimes contemplative, sometimes hopeful, often completely boring,” she chides herself. “Emo talaga, but it is what it is. Next time na ako mag-pop.”
For all her brutal candor and quick wit, what ADR decided to spring on us today is a damn gift: serene, deliberate, reassuring.