Croatian Amor - Finding People EP

Pitchfork 63

Though it has roots in confrontational noise, Loke Rahbek’s project Croatian Amor has spent the last four years with love on the brain. Releases like 2013’s The World function as a sort of ultra-romantic library music, nodding towards grand themes of tragic devotion, heartbreak, and sacrifice without committing to specifics. The action is always off screen, the music an inscrutable cypher. You sense it all comes together in Rahbek’s brain, the project soundtracking his own private film. But last year’s Love Means Taking Action pushed past the patina of lovely haziness and got into the nitty gritty details. Jarring cut up techniques, breathy vocal samples, and disquieting de-tunings fleshed out a haunted, dreary, and stressed worldview. Love is happening, but only over spotty internet connections or in dank rooms, with a murmuring backdrop of the news cycle, the surveillance state, and frayed economies.

Finding People, the new four-song EP on Rahbek’s own Posh Isolation label, goes even farther in this direction. The record is notably more digital, more computer-based, than its predecessors, and it glitches and stutters its way through a landscape of yearning choral pads, dubby loneliness, snatches of video game dialogue. If there’s a love story here, it’s again nested within a larger tale of worldwide despair. The collage of voices on “Sky Walkers” smears together into an ephemeral chorus whose collective utterings, whisperings, and monologues point to a larger meaning. “You’re gonna die… don’t shoot… help us… One life ends, another begins,” it goes, then the sound of panting and running. “You always have to wake up.”

If this sounds familiar, well, it is. Rahbek owes a clear debt to Burial on Finding People, though to his credit, it’s not a direct copy. His melodic sensibility twists into more nervous and aggressive contours, and the locales are more continent-hopping, more transient. Nonetheless, it’s difficult to imagine the grandiose loner-isms of “Keepers” or Khalil’s autotuned R&B crooning on the title track without “In McDonalds,” “Stolen Dog” or “Gutted.” It’s all there: the leaden mood, the self-aggrandizing first-person-shooter narratives, the rainy ambience of the city, fragments of memory swimming around in the background. It’s the sound of losing yourself in another world when the one you live in has too much sorrow to bear.

Each of these four pieces holds up well enough on their own merits, with “Keepers” and “Breathe Into Me” standing out in particular. The former washes over you with an assured drama, while the later ups the menace with a ghostly melody and churning bottom end. As a whole, though, Finding People is slight. The statement that Rahbek seems to be trying to make comes off more as a gesture. Any or all of these tracks would work fantastically on an album, sandwiched between more definitive songs, but taken as a group they coast through moodiness without ever landing on something more substantial. It’s the sound of an artist in transition, taking a few strident steps forward into new territory, then pulling back a few to more comfortable footing. There’s a vibe, but no story. If Love Means Taking Action showed us the scope of Rahbek’s vision, Finding People proves he’s not done searching.