W-H-I-T-E’s third and most recent album, III, is a collection of sounds ranging from dreamy acoustic guitar to psychedelic electric pop. The project was created by Los Angeles-based musician and visual artist, Cory Thomas Hanson, who meshes together tracks that sound like sunlight glittering on water, intense, exciting and complex. The LP, released under Aagoo Records, departs from his older work into a much more melodic, more mainstream direction. III’s music is a tightly packed explosion of sound that sounds as fun and bright as summer on the beach.
Hanson’s background in experimental visual art is apparent in his music, because there’s a sense of texture to his work. This point is further made in the official music video for “I Wasn’t Afraid”, where black-gloved hands squish fruits, twirl telephone chords, and mush through oatmeal. The album’s single itself is an entire wall of music, the synthesizers a chromatic array of sound as Hanson breathes out poetic and catchy vocal hooks. “Pretty Creatures” sounds like an underwater ballet with distant, ghostly keys that mix surprisingly well into a drum machine. Many of the songs channel John Lennon, whom Hanson has a admitted greatly influenced the album, and “Pretty Creatures” is a prime example. However, Hanson’s voice could also draw comparisons to the airy, lilting vocals of Thom Yorke or Wayne Coyne, which only add to the dreaminess of W-H-I-T-E’s overall sound. “Lost” begins as an intellectual acoustic guitar track, but quickly adopts a samba drum beat and skittering electric notes that propel the song into a rainbow of prismatic sound.
The typical definition of white is an absence or lack of color, waiting for some pigment to alter the page or canvas. But white can also be a color in itself, a bright, blinding light that illuminates everything and everyone around it. W-H-I-T-E’s sound is illuminating, with its intense and vivid sound. The tracks cascade like a waterfall, enveloping you in a wall of sound. W-H-I-T-E shows quite a bit of promise in III and it will be exciting to see what comes next.
