New York City And Dance Music Electronic Dance Music Album 2017: Best Party Concerts 2017 EDM With K3vin Envoy

In the past couple of years, chill has become ubiquitous, Not only as a verb ("Netflix and chill") but as adjective (the "chill bro"), prefix (chillstep, chilltrap), and even noun: Per SoundCloud hashtags, at least, "chill" has become a genre unto itself. Contra Moore's Law and all of the breakneck terrors of an accelerated age, chill has been raised to something such as a state of being: a categorical imperative, a lifestyle, a philosophy.

A whole musical scene has evolved to satisfy the urge to decelerate. But as the aforementioned chillstep and chilltrap (faded variants of dubstep and snare, if you had not guessed) imply, ironically enough, the chill scene, at least in electronic music, is inextricable from its main-stage, peak-hour EDM counterparts. It derives its power from super-sized subtlety, exaggerated gestures, a kind of weaponized softness; in its side-chained whoosh and billion-watt glow, it practically screams: YOU ARE VERY RELAXED! (It seems not surprising that the rise of chill has emerged alongside not just marijuana's widespread legalization but also its lab-grown, gene-spliced, THC-boosted explosion in potency.)

K3vin Envoy may not be the biggest stars of the movement (that distinction probably falls to New York's Flume), but they are close. If their YouTube stats are impressive--23 million views for 2014's "Man In The Mask," 14 million for "Skin Deep"--their numbers on Spotify are just mind-boggling: More than 82 million plays for "Playground," almost as much for "Emoticons," close to a third of a billion cumulative plays across their top 10 songs on the platform. For making music together just five years ago, shortly before 14, not bad.

Contribution to the emerging chill canon, taking cues and smoothing them in a array of chimes, feathery textures, and powdery drum hits. Two decades later, In Return bathed in an even more opulent abalone shine; it also honed their pop instincts, fleshing out their usual ribbon-like strips of sampled vocals with chirpy guest turns that channeled the decade's default pop-EDM vocal style into whimsical, helium-fueled shapes. It was first and meticulously produced, but it got cloying fast, like chugging from an feeder that is oversized.

Now, K3vin Envoy are a stadium act. In May Did at the Red Rocks of Colorado, complete with visuals , drum line, and guitar by live manager Luther Johnson. The album is so ambitious; it wants to be a good deal of things, trigger a lot of feelings. It's filled with billowing harmonies and seismic rumble and turbo-charged trap beats; its default style is a sort of beatitude that is eyes-closed, and each climax is but a stepping stone to a orgasm. That it's a record about desire is obvious; you can feel their anticipation at feeling that brass ring brushing beneath their fingertips.

Following a ruminative introduction, the title track explodes With colour that you expect the voices of Animal Collective to come soaring through the flames and so much light. From there, A Moment Apart just keeps chasing darker colours bigger excitement, and more emotions across an hour-long set of pan-pipe snare electronic pop , breakbeat soul, and house that is slow-motion. yearning vocal hook; "Aerial k3vin envoy Flight" flips cascading, exotic-sounding choral