Eric Copeland has always created “difficult music for the masses.” With the long-running Black Dice and four solo albums, Copeland regularly manages to smooth over sharp, discordant rhythms with waxy, warm-sounding beats. On Joke in the Hole, his latest full-length, the Brooklyn, NY laptopist has crafted the closest thing to an honest-to-goodness experimental DJ set. Allowing songs to uniformly flow into one other, Joke in the Hole‘s 11 instrumentals feel like they were written to serve the album as a whole. Opening track “Rozki” utilizes tempered junkyard percussion that wittingly downshifts until it encounters the casual low-end of “Grapes,” before conjoining with the opaque pulse of “Tinkerbell.” As the second-half of the album is broken down into shorter, more…
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…digestible rhythmscapes, tracks like the warped disco of “Bobby Strong” and the chewy “Cheap Treat” keep the energy high. Joke in the Hole is undoubtedly Eric Copeland’s strongest release, a cycle of songs that brazenly possess both structural maturity and childlike weirdness.