Naming genres of music is a tricky business, but goddamn if they didn't nail it with this chillwave shit. Everything you need to know is right there in the heading: down-tempo, chilled-out electro that pulses in organic waves of noise.
The wave bit can be taken at face value as well; this music may be the product of (usually lo-fi) machines, but it sounds like the tides in harmony with the moon. That's before we even get to synonyms like glo-fi and hypnagogic — the former indicating the bedsit-laptop approach that glows like aural mist, the latter a reference to the state between wakefulness and sleep where these songs seem to have been born. It's a style popularized by the label Arcade Sound Ltd and acts like Washed Out and Millionyoung. But the nebulous, Vancouver-based producer Teen Daze has written the genre's most congenial record to date.
Four More Years is a low-settling haze of keyboard squelches and squiggly bass, with ambient, vaporizing synth hooks that cut through the cold like a beacon. The sparse vocals come through here in echoing washes of '80s electro-pop pining. If it weren't for the mid-tempo synth-beat push on songs like "Around" rooting Teen Daze in the firmament, it'd be easy to hold this record tight to your breast like a helium-filled valentine and float off into the clouds.
