Vapor-aesthetic, Sailor Senshi evangelist, and electronic artist Desired dropped a full LP of future funk in 2021, and it is, for lack of a better descriptor, fresh af! It's so fresh that it is literally called Fresh! But even though I've been vibing to that album pretty hard today, I can't say that it's the version of Desired that I prefer. No, my favorite era of their wide discography is the moment in 2017 when they were seemingly inspired by the whole lo-fi hip hop trend to "relax/study/do whatever the fuck to" and conjured up a cloudy, luminous mood ring of sound in the form of Nineteen.
The emphasis of all of the nearly two dozen tracks on Nineteen is the beat. While the beat is an important aspect of every Desired song, it really takes precedence here. Every bassy plunk and ripple is like a warm and thumping all-too-human pulse that fills up the mix like water poured into a vase of flowers. These rhythms seem to come from everywhere at once, like the sound of a heartbeat in a chest, only in this instance flowing through your speakers and pushing out sound like it was balmy human hemoglobin.
The superficial experience of listening to Nineteen is to receive it as an extremely chill and exceptional example of background music. I've done quite a bit of reading to the album and I can certainly attest to its effectiveness as a metronomic study aid. However, a closer listen does tend to reveal its existential layers of emphasis. This is immediately observable from the vocal samples, all of which convey some kind of pain or spiritual sickness. An ennui that cuts like a knife. Probably the peak of which is displayed on "broken" where an unidentified woman can be heard lamenting to her child that the offspring can't experience more happiness, even if it seems like such a feeling should be their birthright. It is the substance of an endless experiential paradox- the importance of something seemingly so illusive and yet ingrained in our understanding of ourselves.
This shaded and brooding pallet of moods extends to the beat choice and timbre of the music as well, feeling like it is all being filtered through a cold shower of a fall rainstorm, or depicted through the stained sepia tones of photographs that have warped and had their colors run due to sitting neglected in a moist space for too long. And this is despite incorporating a contingent of soft and elegant samples befitting a spa engagement, including excerpts of pan flutes ("broken"), vibraphone thrills ("exolution"), and flowy guitar and piano combos ("drops").
All of these elements combine to make Nineteen one of Desired's more mature and emotionally multifaceted albums. If you are curious as to what else the artist is capable of other than bombastic, confetti-bomb, French house mashups, check this one out.