DECEMBER 2008 ONLINE EDITORIALS

Otem Rellik - The Pale of Another Day EP

album cover

By Nathan Harper

Otem Rellik is analog and synth, electric and unplugged, poet and producer, and though he never really breaks out of his melancholic shell, he does manage to project a hundred different shades of gray from the cracks at its edges. In terms of artistic ambition he might be compared to Beck, if Beck grew up on glitch-hop instead of break beats, spent ten years in solitary confinement, and never started sucking. The Pale of Another Day, an 11-track EP that clocks in at twenty-four minutes, works as an artistic junk-drawer of sorts, giving light to some of the performer’s ideas that didn’t have a home on other projects but were too valuable to simply throw away.

Rellik switches seamlessly between doleful acoustic guitar numbers and big, warm electronic songs, once – promise not to tell – almost flirting with dance music. And even when it seems like that track, titled “Raven,” could put Rellik in danger of loosing his emotionally dark balance, it is countered by songs like “Toby Died in a Car Accident,” which carries enough somber gravitas to restore The Pale of Another Day to even keel. As on his previous releases, the lines between rapping and reciting poetry – is there really a difference anyway? – are blurred, and, on these tracks at least, his voice has less high inflection than previous, a welcome change in my book. I was hoping for some circuit bending – might this release be his first to be called “too normal?” – but I’ll settle for some accordion.
www.myspace.com/otemrellik