Love Hallucination

by Jessy Lanza

Overview

Jessy Lanza's move to Los Angeles got off to a shaky start when the musician was nearly struck by a car. Physically unscathed but rattled, Lanza processed her startling agoraphobic episode into "Don't Leave Me Now," an ebullient bolt of techno-pop she delivers with irrepressible zest. An ideal choice for the lead single of Love Hallucination, it fittingly leads the album, her fourth, representative not just for its might but its additional production input from David Kennedy, aka Pearson Sound, aka not Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan -- Lanza's lone creative partner on her first three LPs. Other tracks were made with the likes of Jacques Greene, Marco Niemerski (aka Tensnake), and Paul White, and it's just as notable, maybe more so, that Lanza wrote some of the material with other artists in mind. (Her and White's work on Lapsley's "Pandora's Box" was the first evident result from this development.) While Lanza has never come across as diffident, she is at her most poised and direct on Love Hallucination, another serving of bubbly avant-pop only she could have made. The range of sounds and emotions is a little greater here. "Don't Cry on My Pillow" is a frosted and rigid rebuke with Lanza's sour falsetto instructing a lame partner to keep their hands off her keyboards and not call her mom. On "Marathon," a lightly pulsating, high-gloss slow jam with nimble synth bass, Lanza is just as commanding and more explicit about her expectations in the bedroom. The songs landing somewhere between those extremes deal in more general terms of anticipation, blooming romance, heartache, uncertainty, and anxiety. "Midnight Ontario," with cinematic inspiration from Blade Runner and a highly frictional 2-step skitter ("Where were you in '82 and '92?"), contains Lanza's most transfixing vocals, switching between aching sighs and a plaintive lower register that evokes Aaliyah. Speaking of late-'90s R&B, the next track, the bumping and ecstatic "Limbo," is the closest Lanza has gotten to a track worthy of a So So Def Bass All-Stars compilation. ~ Andy Kellman

Product Details

Release Date:	07/28/2023
Label:	Hyperdub
UPC:	5056321638168
Rank:	61907

Album Credits

Performance Credits

Jessy Lanza   Primary Artist

Technical Credits

Bob Weston   Mastering
David Kennedy   Mixing,Arranger,Additional Production
David Wrench   Mixing,Programming
Jeremy Greenspan   Mixing,Composer,Engineer,Producer
Paul White   Composer,Engineer,Producer
Marco Niemerski   Composer,Engineer,Producer
Jacques Greene   Composer,Engineer,Producer
Jessy Lanza   Composer,Engineer,Lyricist,Producer
Winston H. Case   Art Direction
Landon Yost   Photography