Odds are if you’re familiar with Justin “Party Supplies” Nealis it’s through the Blue Chips mixtape he produced for Action Bronson, a messy collage of deconstructed funk, YouTube clips, and in-jokes floating in a cumulonimbus cloud of weed smoke that ranks among the best rap records of 2012. It’s possible that you may also know him as an MPC jockey who builds beats from scratch in front of a live audience with the same kind of hyperactive energy.
Neither experience is much of an indicator of what to expect from Tough Love, the short-ish first proper album from Party Supplies, which has expanded into a duo with the addition of multi-instrumentalist Sean Mann. Loose-limbed rap beats and frenetic improvisation are in short supply here.
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Instead, Nealis has decided to unveil another musical identity: the slightly sensitive electropop singer-songwriter.
In one fell swoop, he’s put himself at considerable risk of alienating the not-insignificant fan base his beats have attracted, while also entering the crowded electropop market, whose product is being steadily devalued by a seemingly endless procession of knockoff Phoenixes. It’s a risky maneuver, but against all odds, Nealis has pulled it off. Earnest, emotional records with dancefloor aspirations are a dime a dozen in 2013, but few of them work as effectively as Tough Love. It turns out that behind all of the pranky YouTube rips and Guns N’ Roses flips, Nealis is not only a more flexible producer than expected, he’s actually a songwriter of considerable skill and subtlety, not to mention a surprisingly decent vocalist.
Tough Love’s influences are broad and easy to spot. It borrows rhythms from old disco and house records, the plastic-y synthesized sounds of 80s pop, and even a little bit of hair metal in the title song’s drums. Several tracks follow the same dynamic shape that his labelmates like A-Trak and Flosstradamus use to make arena-worthy EDM.
But mostly Nealis seems to draw his inspiration from the evolutionary line of artists blending pop with serious dance music that begins somewhere around New Order and Talking Heads and runs all the way through contemporaries like LCD Soundsystem, Chromeo, and, yes, Phoenix. Like his predecessors, Nealis has found a balance between dance music’s rhythmic focus and pop’s melodic requirements, one that leans a little more heavily on melody’s side– none of Tough Love’s nine tracks are difficult to imagine in an electronics-free arrangement. And also like his forebears, his best songs combine dance music’s ecstatic qualities with a sense of urgent yearning, expressed in vocal parts that glide over the eddies that their stomping backing tracks propulsively kick up. It’s the type of thing you can find yourself singing along to without knowing it.
Despite the dramatic change in direction and mood, Tough Love still sounds essentially like a Party Supplies record. The songs are more carefully considered and arranged than Blue Chips, and a world away stylistically, but you can still identify Nealis’ quirks in the way he places sounds against each other, the odd near-subliminal jokes (like sampling David Lee Roth’s isolated vocals from “Running With the Devil” on “Cherry Valley”), and in the slightly grimy lo-fi sonic aura that surrounds even the most straight-up pop cuts.