Multi-Love

"Multi-Love" is the title track from Ruban Nielson's most autobiographical album, and it carries the full weight of that intimacy. The song is built around a thick, pillowy synthesizer foundation — chords that hang in the air with the warmth of vintage analog equipment — over which Nielson layers his falsetto, woozy and luminous, processed through the lo-fi aesthetic that defines Unknown Mortal Orchestra's sound even as the production ambition grew substantially. The subject is a polyamorous relationship that Nielson experienced directly, and the music captures the emotional complexity of that territory with remarkable precision: there is genuine warmth and celebration in the sound, a psychedelic soul lushness that feels like abundance, but threaded through it is something more ambivalent — jealousy, confusion, the vertigo of loving multiply. The groove moves with unhurried confidence, bass and drums locked into a pocket that suggests summer heat, easy physicality, the blur of feeling. Nielson came up in the New Zealand indie scene before relocating, and UMO's music carries traces of that background alongside obvious debts to classic psychedelia and soul. "Multi-Love" is music for late summer afternoons that extend past sunset, for the specific bittersweet quality of abundance complicated by emotion, for those who have ever felt that love's expansion created as much disorientation as joy.