Kelly Lee Owens - Kelly Lee Owens (Extended Version) (2017)

In electronic music, debut albums are often statements of aesthetic purpose. They are initial arguments in favor of a certain style or technique and pledges of allegiance to this or that subgenre. The debut of Welsh-born musician Kelly Lee Owens feels more personal; not so much a way of saying, “This is what I do,” but, “This is who I am.” The 28-year-old musician grew up singing in choirs and dabbled in bass and drums. In her early 20s, she interned at XL Recordings, played in the indie rock band called the History of Apple Pie, and worked in record stores. It was there she met fellow coworkers Daniel Avery and Ghost Culture, who got her into the studio and gave her a push to put her own music out in the world. But her debut album doesn’t feel like a debut. Its songs don’t so much feel like the product of her experiences as they do some hard-to-measure leap beyond them—a message in a bottle that’s come bobbing back from somewhere in the future.

One of the big surprises is the extent to which dream pop gives the record its overarching shape, despite her tutelage with techno guys Avery and Ghost Culture, and despite the floor-filling bent of her early remix of Jenny Hval’s “Kingsize.” The first sounds on the album are strings and her own voice, beatific in its aura of breath and reverb, paired with deep sub-bass. Over ringing tabla accents and a synth melody that burbles like a water fountain shot in slo-mo, she sings of love and the meeting of minds. There are more gaps than words, lending the impression that we’re listening in on her inchoate thoughts as they assemble themselves out of nothingness. The album’s second song, “Arthur,” is a tribute to Arthur Russell, the avant-pop polymath, and while it may not sound much like his own work, her samples of running water and her echo’s wispy contrails capture his vision of music as something that could emerge from the mist, or disappear into it.

There’s no single stylistic through-line and the tempos are all over the map. “Evolution” is bleepy, minimalist techno that’s content to hang back in the shadows; “CBM,” whose title condenses the song’s looped chant of “The colors, the beauty, and the motion,” is a dreamier take on peak-time abandon, when strobe lights turn a dancefloor’s moving bodies into snapshots of a roiling sea. At the other end of the spectrum is the shimmering “Keep Walking,” which sounds like the Jesus and Mary Chain covered in balloons and glitter, or the gorgeous “Anxi.,” where Owens channels Sarah Records and Slumberland in falsetto harmonies the color and texture of milk quartz. In the song’s first section, it’s easy to imagine it as an ambient remix of Frankie Rose.