Methyl Ethel - Are You Haunted? (Deluxe) (2022)

An album prepared in remote Western Australia during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Are You Haunted? found Methyl Ethel showrunner Jake Webb honing his studio skills while forced off the road. Meanwhile, he put together a new backing band that includes two drummers and focused himself on the piano, an instrument heavily featured here amid vast psychedelic pop landscapes. In fact, Webb has said that he envisioned the album as coming from the dreams of a man seated on a stool at an upright piano. Hardly a set of chamber ballads, it quickly enters dream territory with the theatrical prelude "Ghosting," whose arpeggiated piano and shifting tonal center are detailed with shadowy, dissonant strings and, eventually, synths, vocal effects, and pulsing bass. Overtop, Webb's dramatic melody guides a lost soul toward an escape route via self-medication. With a track list that balances danceability with midtempo melancholy as it unfolds, Are You Haunted? includes some of the project's most club-oriented fare to date, including the urgent "Matters" and the EDM and dance-rock crossover entry "Neon Cheap." That song's components include megaphone effects, handclaps, and some of the recurring, Greek chorus-style group vocals found elsewhere on the album. Bending more toward the stylistically trippy and epic, the record's two longest tracks, "Castigat Ridendo Mores" and "One and Beat," move through sections of solo piano, experimental electronics, and rousing orchestral synth pop while, in the case of the latter song, examining the symbiosis between musician and audience. Are You Haunted? is also the first Methyl Ethel record to feature another singer when Stella Donnelly guests on "Proof," a more straightforward dance-pop entry, if one with warped timbres and swirling synths that stimulate a upward key change. Ultimately landing like an unfocused but intriguing concept album, Are You Haunted? delivers some hearty grooves along the way to ease searching, otherworldly transport.