felicita - Spælarkle (2024)

Xmas comes early for felicita fiends with a 36 track expansion pak addendum to their ’23 album, tripled in length with loads of variations and guest chops by Caroline Polachek, A.G. Cook, and Kero Kero Bonito for an overproof boost of cute accelerationism. A key part of the PC Music family since their early days, and active as an outlier of avant-pop computer music since the early ‘00s, felicita has long been one of the most intriguing characters in their quarter, plying a beguiling, intricate style of composition that doesn’t sit neatly in any bracket but clearly sits most comfortably within PC Music’s microcosm. ’Spælarkle’ is the sibling piece to the ’Spalarkle’ album of 2023, and renders that album’s ideas along myriad hyperprismic lines of thought that are pretty difficult to fully grasp here due to their abundance and complexity. Yet as with all felicita music, it glistens with fleeting hooks in craftily kerned arrangements that make for a thrilling joyride between its 36 pieces in 41 minutes. Standouts include a rework of an original album highlight in ‘Sex with anemone (You know who you are)’, reshod with a unicorn-trot rhythm and re-vaulted vox, along with an elegiac club tribute to peer and label mate in ‘Exolight Variations V (For SOPHIE)’, and a taut take on prevailing Venezuelan hard house styles in ‘Raptor dialectics (Ocean)’, whilst the likes of ‘Beast (for tuba, clarinet, percussion)’ and the synthetic chamber music of ‘And the sun in my eyes’ prove their avant-classical proclivities, along with the uncanny valley allure of a ‘Resistance (Scattering)’ that stands as shining example that belies the a maturity under the hood of hyperpop’s ostensibly lurid sugar rush; an antithesis to so much pap that passes under its banner.