“It’s just another day in my kingdom of fun,” is how Clothing’s debut experimental pop album, From Memory, starts, and it’s a body-moving, heart-spinning, mind-melding eight song offering as mercurial as memory itself. Made up of Dawn of Midi’s Aakaash Israni and Cookies’ Ben Sterling, along with four guest vocalists, it is a project ten years in the making, but much worth the wait. You can hear the influence of experimental bands such as Animal Collective, and the wonder of listening is in the vibrant synergy of adventurous melody, rhythm, and words.

It was work to create this music and it is a bit of work to listen to as well. Like Animal Collective before them, Clothing is pushing into the future of experimental pop music and making the boldest of imaginations accessible to the masses. It is the kind of music that takes some listens to get used to, but opens up to you with repeated listens. Some of the inroads are their clever lyrics which talk about “Paper Money” and “Afternoon Television,” on an album which starts with “fun” and ends in “oblivion”.

“Embracing absurdity is the only way either of us survive in this world,” Sterling says. “I’m sure that it informs everything that we do.” Part of the delay in creating the album was the challenge of working with their vocalists of choice, Amber Coffman, from the Dirty Projectors, Elliott Skinner, L’Rain, and Anna Wise, who wow with their soulful performances on this album. Their impassioned deliveries match the powerful electricity of the instrumentation, which includes Ian Chang on drums on a number of tracks.

“I’m a bumble bee / Straight up in the air / I won the lottery / But it’s a nightmare / To make something out of nothing,” Elliott Skinner sings on the song of the same name. Both Israni and Sterling are veterans of the creative process, however, and they sublimate their struggles on this blissful thirty minute record. “I can’t tell which way to go / Maybe yes and maybe no / When everything’s for free,” is how they put it on the sixth song of the album, with its arpeggiated keyboards and frenetic beat.

It’s an album of adventurous songs and interesting poetry that aims to engage the listener on every level, from the visceral to the cerebral, from latent to ecstatic. “Do you remember / or was it all a dream?” they end the album on the pulsing jazz-influenced song, “Sunset?” “Here comes oblivion / oh oh here it comes.” The album is a quick offering, but it is jam-packed with modern emotion, making the most of the time that they and we have been gifted with. A triumphant debut.

Order From Memory HERE