Bleep

As if to downplay the unprecedented impact they’ve had on the major motion picture circuit — or perhaps to exacerbate their polymathic disposition — Good Sad Happy Bad member and accolade-adorned composer Mica Levi follows up their 2020 solo release Ruff Dog with its spiritual successor, Blue Alibi. The singular playfulness of Levi’s score work transposes itself upon this LP, rendering an elemental magnetism — once felt in the vista-spanning strings of Jackie and the György Ligeti avant-garde sound design of Under The Skin — in a tumultuous, homemade, lo-fi texture.

That said, Blue Alibi comes off as a pop album, with the hooky spontaneity of a Raincoats single paired with the free-associative approach of This Heat, recorded as if housebound during a particularly cold season. Auditory cabin fever ensues on the wiry skronk of ‘Whack’, a brooding piece of precision naïveté, later followed by the pseudo-grunge whip-crack of ‘Sticks & Stones’. Through the mist of journal-like intimacy comes something as melodically beautiful as ‘Waves’, a tune made all the more evocative of an impossibly large ocean by its staunch minimalism; nothing but Levi and an old acoustic guitar.

Blue Alibi shows that Levi’s sustained ability to invoke whole worlds rings true, even when armed with the slightest of means.