For fans of Me Lost Me, Animal Collective, To Die on Ice, trip hop, and turning to an old favorite band for comfort during hard times, The Limits of a Light Touch by Troth reanimate the art pop of the previous generation, using a distinctly liminal, eerily off-kilter approach that constantly reminds us how much times have changed. Those light, soaring vocals remain, but their words twist here into unrecognizable shapes, entering an uncanny valley of near-comprehensibility which keeps us constantly grasping for concrete meaning. Similarly, the expansive digital basslines and eclectic percussion samples stand behind a veneer of distortion and compression which makes their style feel distant, like a dream with fuzzy edges and obscured details. Unlike in other hypnagogic-esque records, Troth takes their historic influences entirely seriously, and that dream state doesn’t feel disparaging or depressive. Sure, those days are gone, but their memory still inspires a joy in us which will never burn out, and the lessons we learned then can still inspire excellent, inventive art today.
