Delroy Edwards & Dean Blunt - Desert Sessions

Though both Delroy Edwards and Dean Blunt are singular artists, they actually have a lot in common. They're mercurial to a sometimes frustrating extent. Both make all kinds of music and put it out in prolific spurts, spanning garage rock, wistful indie, sound collage, R&B and hip-hop. Now they've made something equally unexpected together. Sometime last year, Blunt and Edwards spent a few months in Los Angeles jamming together, and decided to turn the results into an album. Like much of their work,is pleasing and baffling in equal measure.If you're expecting the witty Blunt styles of Black Metal or Babyfather , don't get your hopes up. The ultra-lo-fi, cheap keyboard preset sound ofmore closely echoes early Hype Williams (such as the warped and overheated funk Black Is Beautiful ). The album leans on Edwards' more experimental side, too, and he's no stranger to this kind of homemade weirdness. You can hear Edwards in the splatters of guitar on the third track, or the guitar solo on "Audio Track 08," which sounds like it's coming from an old transistor radio. Once you zero in on it, though, it becomes one of the LP's most memorable passages.is full of bizarre sounds and interplay. "Audio Track 09" features long-sustain notes that sound like a vacuum cleaner. "Audio Track 04" rides an unsteady drum track that occasionally lags behind and then stumbles over itself. "Audio Track 12," with its unusually clear cymbal crashes and '80s synth stabs, sounds like someone noodling on a cheap keyboard. The same goes for the next track, where what sounds like a synth tuba plays unevenly beneath screeching chords—one of the few moments where the album veers a little too far off the beaten path.is playful and irreverent one moment, deadly serious the next. Blunt and Edwards tease out new ideas in each other, and their idiosyncratic styles go together surprisingly well. It's a classically cheeky triumph for both artists: a collaboration that sounds tossed-off yet utterly engaging.