Album Of The Week: Autre Ne Veut Anxiety

Interesting things are happening in R&B lately, with guys like Frank Ocean and Miguel and the Weeknd pushing the genre in directions both introspective and sonically expansive, somehow getting popular in the process. But Arthur Ashin, who records as Autre Ne Veut, isn't really a part of that. Like his buddy How To Dress Well, Ashin is a studio-nerd type, a devotee of various way-out musical styles who's found ways to use some of the sonic language of R&B to get at ideas and feelings that he might not have accessed otherwise. Anxiety, Autre Ne Veut's second album, is emotionally genuine music, but it's not R&B any more than Channel Pressure, the album from Ashin's label bosses Ford & Lopatin, was '80s TV-show theme music. If we try to judge Anxiety as straight-up R&B, it'll always come up lacking -- Ashin's voice is nowhere near as buttery and effortless as those of the singers who obviously influenced him, his hooks come and go at will, his backing tracks are more about haze than languor. But as an album of inward-looking pop-music from a pop-music outsider, Anxiety shines.