Is chillwave dead?  Many seem to think so.  The made-for-humor genre and name rose to prominence back in the summer of 2009, when satirical music blog Hipster Runoff coined the term.  Chillwave music mostly consists of lo-fi aesthetics (i.e. many of the artists who first became associated with the genre recorded solely on their laptops, using samplers etc.) and reverb, all with pop-like hooks.  But at the core of chillwave is a summery, hazy feel in the music that can invoke nostalgia as well as bright tomorrows.

If one thing is for sure though, it’s that the artists who rose to prominence by being lumped into this genre are not dead.  Chillwave-tagged artists such as Neon Indian, Toro Y Moi, and Memory House are still very alive and kicking, with all of these acts having released new material in the past year.  If anything is dead, it’s the need people have to immediately slap the word “chillwave” on to something and dismiss it as such.  And because of the people who dismissed chillwave as a silly made-up blog genre, as well as natural musical evolvement, many of the pioneering chillwave acts have moved further and further away from their bedrooms, laptops, and samplers and into full-band arrangements, with more live instrumentation.  And this is exactly Washed Out’s frontman Ernest Greene’s modus operandi on his sophomore studio album.

With Paracosm, Greene moves further and further away from his blissful but shy early EPs and even from his synth-heavy debut album Within and Without, and into something more “orchestral”, as Greene says himself in a video detailing the instruments and work that went into making Paracosm.  Now sure, while the harp sounds you hear on the title track may not be from an actual harp, Greene made a point of using “interesting sounds” on this record that made him stray away from his old MIDI keyboards and synths.  Instead, he uses old and peculiar instruments such as the Chamberlin, Mellotron, Novatron, and Optigan.  Another instrument that is more prominent on this record than any other Washed Out record is the acoustic guitar, which makes sense, as Greene started developing most of the tracks on this record with that instrument alone.  The faint and fast strums of Greene’s new instrumental inclusion blend well with the rest of the “orchestral” sounds Greene was aiming for on Paracosm, especially on the track “All I Know”.

Now while “All I Know” may be an exception, the sad part about this record is after the first three tracks (yes, I count the instrumental opener “Entrance” as a song), the quality slowly starts to drop off.  The album’s first two singles “It All Feels Right” and “Don’t Give Up” are beautiful pieces of slow-burning summertime music for those late nights that you’ll remember better when you look back on them rather than when you’re living them in the present moment.  On the other hand, tracks like “Weightless” and the title track fall victim to chillwave’s most common blunder, being boring.  But when you put the most stellar track(s) at the very beginning of the album, the rest of it can’t help but to seem lightweight in comparison (looking at you, Movement).  I will say that with this album, it’s nice that Greene is starting to move away from the same old doldrums of sampling and synths that inhibited his earlier work and into more live-friendly and varied instrumentation that give his songs more room to flesh themselves out and breathe.

The word paracosm is defined as “a detailed imaginary or fantasy world”, and if that’s what Greene was trying to create on Paracosm, then he succeeds.  With its warm and rich sounds that fill every corner of your ear, Paracosm is truly an album’s album that deserves to be listened to in whole to experience all of the tracks blending seamlessly together. But, while the album starts off strong, it can’t help but to lose strength as it progresses, turning a detailed imaginary world, into a nice but forgettable daydream.

6/10