In the first few seconds of “APART,” off of New Haven-based musician Mitch Pascal’s Hyper Eternal, a fragment of Pascal’s voice floats to the top of a building wave, the beginning of the song’s jittery, enormous rhythm. A skittering quadruple-timed drum machine and a square blip of a synthesizer announce the song’s key. Then Pascal makes his entrance, his raspy, confident tenor sounding utterly human.
“No time to play around / We could paint the town / So we don’t listen to nobody, we just listen to our hearts. / We can’t wait to drown / In this crazy sound / You’ll be with me at the finish if you’re with me from the start.”
This opening stanza is maybe the most direct way in Hyper Eternal, an album that immerses itself in a few different shades of current dance music and emerges on the other side as a pop record that’s vibrant, urgent, and just a little bit eerie.
As an exercise in production, the album showcases how emotive electronic music can be when the people at the knobs are paying attention to details. The drum patterns are never just loops; the programmed hi-hats, follow the vocabulary of trap, move from eighth notes to triplets to buzzes of notes from one beat to the next to draw the ear and move the feet. Likewise, the choices of sounds, and the way those sounds are manipulated, keep the rhythm at a steady pulse while always offering a bit of novelty, a reason to keep listening. Pascal also keeps varying up the texture from song to song, from the faraway, warbling whistles married and the buzzing bass on the album’s opener, “For”; to the plucked and chopped patches up front and the rushing stringlike sounds in the back on the reggaeton-inflected “Melt Away”; to the air-raid-siren-meets-electronic frog palette of sound that holds down the harmonic structure of “Take My Advice.”
The album’s closer, “Weapon,” features a stuttering organ over a submerged set of drum sounds that replace the conventions of trap with something a little darker sounding. Fans of current dance music and R&B with find a lot that’s familiar (read: a lot to like), and for listeners who have yet to take the plunge, Hyper Eternal is as good as place as any to start.
Yet, as bands have learned year after year, since it became viable to make songs and entire albums on electronic instruments, reaching the masses requires the right voice out front, and the right decisions about how to use it. Pascal makes a lot of the right decisions. His voice is a knife, its natural rasp an edge he uses to cut through even the denser productions on the album and make himself heard. At the same time, he’s not afraid to subject his voice to the same kinds of aggressive manipulations that the rest of the music on the album undergoes.
So in the first 30 seconds of “Hiiiiii,” Pascal’s voice, drenched in reverb, goes from a naked croon to a pitch-shifted electronic baritone to a octave-bolstered Autotune. For the next 15 seconds, it’s another one of the instruments until his natural voice returns. But having established those wide parameters, for the rest of the song Pascal then seemingly tries everything at least once, with engaging results. And on “Cellphones,” Pascal’s treatment of his voice sounds for all the world like a ringtone.
But Pascal isn’t hiding behind the electronics or the hands-on production. He comes across as an artist restless with musical ideas, a man with a sound in his head and the skills to chase it — and through the 11 tracks on Hyper Eternal, he does just that.
