Album Review: Para by Lord RAJA

There's a striking consistency running through Para, Chester Raj Anand's follow-up his 2014 debut album, A Constant Moth. Sure, consistency may not normally be thought of as a particularly noteworthy attribute for an album—but when a producer is tossing as many ideas around as Anand is capable of, it's worth mentioning. Better known to fans of aural experimentalism as Lord RAJA, Anand's latest doesn't have a structural theme, exactly.

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Compared to A Constant Moth, Chester Raj Anand's first album for Ghostly International, Para strikes as a more playful and sculpted synthesis of bygone and 2010s electronic-underground styles. Armed with sounds of vintage gear recorded at a hospitable Austin, Texas instrument shop, Anand created Para in a number of locations, yet the album sounds like it was made in deep, zoned-out concentration. Its track sequencing is fluid as well, even when the array of approaches verges on excessive.

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Alittle Cosmogramma on this, jazzy with the intergalactic vibes. Wobbly a bit too, absolutely, and a little fuzzy, with warmth, with that vinyl-crackle heat coupled with a spaceship coldness. Yeah, it’s bathed in the glow of the beautiful sublime, even if the sublime must die, and does die, and with it all the most gorgeously constructed beats, full of harps, smiles, naked bodies, and fair-trade coffee.

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We’re inundated with so much music now that, more and more, great collections of songs go unnoticed — especially when music critics go into hyperdrive during list-making season. So here’s the best music that SPIN slept on these past few months, including two of the great rhymers who still ….

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