Thomas Arsenault, the person who records as Mas Ysa, is difficult to pin down, and thats probably the best thing about him. Hes lived in Montreal and San Francisco and Sao Paolo and New York and wherever Oberlin is. Hes scored modern dance productions and remixed synthpop groups. He sometimes sings in an angelic, reverby tenor and sometimes in a full, throat-wracked howl. He makes mostly electronic records, and he does it by itself, but producer somehow doesnt seem like the right job title for him. (Ive also seen people describe him as a composer, and that seems even more wrong.) Listening to his records, its hard to tell which sounds are electronic and which are made by actual physical instruments. His music drifts freely between ambient and synthpop and oblique dance and good old-fashioned indie rock. And hes conclusively proven that you dont need a full band to sound vaguely like Arcade Fire.
Mas Ysa made his name on last years Worth EP, which alternated between drifting, pretty synth-drone and big, chest-thumping psychedelic laptop-rock howlers. On Seraph, his first proper album, Arsenault pretty much smushes those two things together until theyre one thing, and the result is a pleasant drift that never settles on one genre for more than a few seconds and stays appealing and interesting throughout. All the individual sounds, like the glassy walls of keyboard on Sick or the happy-sigh New Order beeps of Look Up, have an impressive widescreen gloss to them. Arsenaults voice has that quavery tone that was so popular among mid-00s indie-dude singers, in which every word means so much that he just cant choke it out without his throat catching. Some tracks play around with Euro-club house-thumps, which sounds shockingly good with this sort of singing and this sort of production. Nicole Miglis from Hundred Waters shows up on Gun, and her airy coo works as an absolutely lovely complement to Arsenaults emotive gurgle. Service has some seriously badass Moroder-style Italo pulsing. Theres a lot to like here.
