Once you start hurtling through space, time gets weird—that was Einstein’s whole thing. Even before billionaires were launching electric cars playing David Bowie songs into the outer reaches of our solar system, he theorized something about how time slows down during interstellar travel. I’m too dumb to grasp the particulars, but I’m pretty sure it explains the existence of Starchild & the New Romantic, the George Clinton-riffing project of New York resident Bryndon Cook.
According to the liner notes of old Parliament-Funkadelic records, Starchild is a sort of god alien sent to connect Earth-bound peons to the mothership up above—to deliver a tether to the sound of the cosmos. Knowing that, it’s an auspicious name to assume for yourself, but Cook’s demonstrated some of the timeline-disrupting powers of an extraterrestrial explorer. Over the last few years, he’s demonstrated an uncanny knowledge of both R&B’s past and destiny, traversing between Clinton’s interstellar explorations, lush 90s-indebted excesses, and futurist production tricks, all of which come to a head this week on his debut full-length Language.
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Of course, Cook’s backstory, as a graduate of SUNY Purchase and a former Pitchfork intern, is a little more mundane than the name he’s chosen for his project, but only a little. As he’s worked on his Starchild material off and on, he’s also become a pal and collaborator to some of the worlds best producers of thoughtful, symphonic, and emotive pop music. He sang on one of the best tracks from the just released Porches record, worked with Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes on a handful of projects, and most visibly he’s long been a member of Solange’s touring band. If you went to one of her shows and saw someone hit intricate choreography, then launch immediately into a limber guitar solo (or do both at the same time), that was Cook.
Those experiences, along with the schooling he received growing up in a particularly musical household, all feed into Language’s standout tracks like the cosmic slow jam “Can I Come Over?” which uses Cook’s breathy falsetto and tensile guitar leads as the background for a moving meditation on human relation in the era of pocket supercomputing. Via email, Cook explains that the track is at the center of Language’s thematic concerns. “This song is the bassline of the album, he explains. “[It’s] my favorite and the heart of the telecommunication theme of the record. Its vibes pull from 1981 George Clinton and 1983 James Mtume. [I] really wanted to make my version of something catchy like ‘Atomic Dog’ or ‘Juicy Fruit’ because those kinds of songs have impacted my life strongly.”
Despite those retro-leaning references, there’s something decidedly boundary-pushing about “Can I Come Over?” as it dizzily packs in harmonies in the margins before ending on Cook’s manipulated vocals and an instrumental outro as coldly weightless as the vast expanses Clinton’s Starchild character supposedly calls home.
It’s a beauty, one of the record’s best, and you can listen right here in advance of Language’s release on Ghostly on February 23.
