Centered around the team of singer/songwriter
Dominic Angelella
and producer
Ritz Reynolds
,
DRGN King
's 2013 debut album,
Paragraph Nights
, balances soulful melodic songwriting with some psychedelic-tinged, electronica- and hip-hop-influenced production. With his laid-back, hippie-fied soulfulness,
Angelella
has a knack for coming up with a catchy melody and his songs often bring to mind the R&B-folk of
Shuggie Otis
and the confident hipster wisdom of
Odelay
-era
Beck
. There is an adventurous, lightly experimental quality to many of the cuts on
, and songs like the bluesy, glitter rock stomper "Holy Ghost" and the fuzzy, girl group-sounding "Altamont Sunrise" play like long-lost college radio hits from the '90s. Similarly, tracks like the ebullient and driving "Wild Night" and the laid-back "Warriors" are perfect groovers for a late-summer afternoon. These are infectious, sunny cuts that mix the wide-eyed pop freedom of
the Flaming Lips
with a DJ's sense of dance club timing. Elsewhere, the disorienting and woozy "Barbarians," with its whining synths and buzzy low-end bassline, has a kind of genre-bending energy and cockeyed story arc that, much like the rest of
, brings to mind a less bleak if equally as spiritually transcendent version of
'
The Soft Bulletin
. In that sense,
fits nicely alongside works by such similarly minded contemporaries as
MGMT
and
AM & Shawn Lee
. Ultimately,
plays like a loose, sometimes literate, and often wry slacker song cycle about love, life, and good times. ~ Matt Collar