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The self-titled debut full-length from Happy Holiday is a Zoloft-fueled mishmash of bedroom recordings, sounding as if someone with pop intellect sad-fucked a Yamaha keyboard. The thirteen songs mix minimalist breakbeats with fuzzed out synthlines and completely random samples. Some tracks show interesting movement, like “Tangent Dreams,” which sounds as though Robert Smith had a platonic encounter with an 8-bit processor which he still regrets not taking further. One track is an interesting taste of sadboy bounce music, and the next will be a trashgaze junkie’s manifesto of cassette culture. No matter what it touches on stylistically, the release routinely shows signs that the artist behind it is well versed in the conventions of inventive songwriting.
