Days

The music of North Carolina-based duo Earthly (Edaan Brook and Brint Hansen) displays a fascination with popular music and culture, yet they don't actually attempt to make pop music themselves, at least in a conventional sense. Their gleeful, fractured tracks feature a multitude of voices, but they're not arranged into proper verse/chorus/verse structure with lyrics, and it's impossible to tell if they're sampled or if they belong to the duo's members themselves. The playfully manipulated, cartoonish voices frolic amongst colorful melodies that could soundtrack a puzzle game for any 32-or-higher-bit Nintendo system, along with bottles popping, fluttering strings, and a multitude of other joyous sounds. Even at its most hectic, such as the sliced-and-diced "Glaze," Earthly's music is still melody-rich and approachable rather than pretentious and alienating. Likewise, the album's most serene ambient cut ("Daemon") can't resist throwing in a slightly goofy horn sample. Embracing diverse elements such as Muzak textures, R&B samples, choppy trip-hop beats, and silly computer voices, Earthly take a refreshing anything-goes approach to abstract electronic music.