The FADER’s “Songs You Need” are the tracks we can’t stop playing. Check back every day for new music and follow along on our Spotify playlist.
A great way to get a sense of Bibio‘s diversity of sound is to follow his “Excuses” song series. The first, released on 2011’s Mind Bokeh, is pure, glitched-out melancholia, like a slowly degrading Beta Band composition with fatter drums. On that same album, you’ll find “More Excuses,” a song that darned the distance between Bibio’s compositions as an electronic music producer and folk singer-songwriting. Listening to these songs together is reminiscent of watching two very different siblings play a game of telephone: absorbing a narrative and unspooling it in their own unique ways.
“Even More Excuses,” the latest installment, does away with the lyrical bonds uniting the previous songs and introduces yet another new sound: jazzy, plush soft-rock. Here, the artist born Stephen James Wilkinson adopts the Phill Collins school of lulling, gentle lead vocal performances, his croon the texture of down feathers around palatial, glittering instrumentation. It’s perhaps not shocking that Bibio could refresh and revitalize the sounds usually found on your white dad’s adult contemporary playlist. He’s certainly proved capable of skipping across music’s tides like a perfectly smooth pebble, and “Even More Excuses” sounds like the work of someone just getting started.