Album Of The Week: Washed Out Paracosm

There's no nice way to say this, but during a busier week, Paracosm, the second album from Washed Out, wouldn't have gotten that Album Of The Week nod. During next Tuesday's new-release avalanche (Earl Sweatshirt! Superchunk! No Age! A$AP Ferg!), it would've been immediately lost in the shuffle. And indeed, it seems almost expressly designed to get lost in the shuffle. This is intricately sculpted soft-pop music, music about drift and indecision, overloaded with harps and keyboard squiggles and bird noises, sung in the sort of voice that suggests the split-second when you wake up from an afternoon nap and you're not yet sure where you are or what day it is. I don't like it as much as Washed Out's first album, the gorgeously memory-dazed 2011 synthpop makeout collection Within And Without. I don't even like it as much as Life Of Leisure, the 2010 EP that more or less accidentally defined chillwave the same way the first Ramones album more or less accidentally defined punk. And yet Paracosm is a good album with a few great moments. And more important than that, it's an album that defines a mood, or a moment.