Alan Palomo (of Neon Indian)’s World of Hassle is a vivid piece of world-building that takes listeners into a slightly surreal pocket dimension saturated with anxiety & nostalgia, where jazz-funk & wide-shouldered Claude Montana suits never went out of style, & the Cold War chill that suffused Leonard Cohen’s 1988’s I’m Your Man never lifted.
Palomo’s WoH is a Pynchonesque place, packed w/ characters and situations rendered in dreamily absurdist strokes—guerilla freedom fighters camped out in a Rainforest Cafe in “The Wailing Mall,” a crumbling ex-pop star in “The Return of Mickey Milan,” the Leisure Suit Larry-does-Ibiza fantasy of “Nudista Mundial ’89” (featuring Mac DeMarco, who hosted some of the album’s sessions in his home studio). There’s a free-floating air of anxiety, compounded by a crisply digitized sonic palette borrowed from the 80s golden age of rock stars like Bryan Ferry leaving their own breakthrough projects to strike out as jazzy solo musicians.
It’s parody, sure—of rock star ego trips, the mall-ification of America, and our own self-obsession, even on the brink of apocalypse—but it’s also dead serious, the sound of history repeating itself as the Doomsday Clock clicks past its Reagan-era maximum and nuclear anxiety comes back into style along with digital synthesizers and sax solos. The deeper it pulls you into its own uncanny reality, the clearer it becomes how thin the borders are between Palomo’s WoH & our own.
