Minnesota-based producer Dosh has apparently found a renewed source of vigor and purpose since the implementation of lockdowns last year. Prior to the pandemic, Dosh hadn't released an album in seven years. Now, he is on his second release in ten months. Following the Summertime EP, Tomorrow 1972 is similar in that it maintains a stylistic consistency that is closely tied to a wisely constrained set of ideas, melodies, and instrumental choices, a fact that seems unremarkable until it is experienced in full. Both albums rely on various forms of late 20th Century jazz to pump life into the vessel of their chambers, with Summertime dipping its toes into sticky, warm Headhunter fusion, while Tomorrow 1972 drains from Dosh's subconscious, a sip of spacey, post-bopping nectar.
"Manhattan" begins the album with what sounds like a jazz orchestra slowly liquifying into soup, dripping note by note into a tin can to be sold as a health supplement. "Wake Me Up When It's Over" trades in some Weather Channel-friendly melodies that rinse and splatter like a mid-afternoon rain against a nearby window pain, lulling you to sleep on a lazy summer day while your cares evaporate into the atmosphere. Beyond just explorations in mood and sound though, I think Tomorrow 1972 is an album that uses the light of reflection on one's past and relations, in order to find a path forward in life. This is evidenced from not only the specific year in the title, but also by the track "Big Floyd," a clear tribute to George Floyd, a man murder at the hands of Minneapolis police, whose death resulted in a fiery surge of justified anger last summer, and whose life is celebrated here with cool, balmy echos and wide-circumference ripples. A fitting sonic shrine to a man, who, by all accounts, was a tender, peaceful soul. Then there is "Tomorrow Is In The Bones," constituting a poem read to bestow respect on the memory of Dosh's Anticon label co-founder and friend Brendon "Alias" Whitney, a track that allows certain words of affection and imagination to filters like a white fox through a thicket of smooth and clean smelling underbrush and to frolic atop spiritual buttresses anchored to clouds, encouraged by silver-lined synth tones and the yodeling instrumentation of a homespun, folk-orchestra.
You can never go back the way you came, but you can always learn to better appreciate how you got here.
