Albums
Magnolia
2018
Release Date: 2018
By Pitchfork
Reviewed May 1, 2018
The Swedish producer’s new song rhapsodizes about the spiritual side of rave
Stockholm’s Studio Barnhus label tends to linger at the intersection of mischievous and wistful: See, for instance, Axel Boman’s misty-eyed tribute to ABBA, or HNNY’s hypnotic edit of Mariah Carey’s “I Want to Know What Love Is.” The Swedish producer Bella Boo’s new EP for the imprint maintains a similar sense of balance, divided between wonky house and more contemplative, downbeat fare. “Magnolia,” the centerpiece of the record, might be the flat-out dreamiest thing to come from the label yet.
The voluminous kick drum and booming toms are red herrings: Despite the ample low end and crisply swinging groove, the track offers a vision of ambient house at its most ethereal. Silvery pings flit with ghostly motion around the edges of the track, and wispy chords drift like cirrocumulus formations, while the spoken-word interlude brings to mind the Orb’s ambient-house classic “Little Fluffy Clouds.” Likewise, the monologue isn’t afraid to invoke the sublime; in what sounds like a television interview, an unidentified woman quietly rhapsodizes in a sing-song brogue about the spiritual side of rave: hands reaching to the skies, beatific smiles on people’s faces, all of it like something out of a biblical epic. “I’m not religious, but it’s quite divine,” she concludes, and the way the beat kicks back in at that very moment is enough to make a believer out of anybody.