Geographer, Alone Time EP

If you’re an artist of any kind, whether it’s music or painting or writing or photography or whatever, editing is one of the hardest things to do. And no, I don’t mean the actual action of editing is hard — hell, that’s what I do for a living, and it doesn’t really take a lot beyond a nitpicky eye — but being tough enough with your own work to be able to cut it way, way, way back. Sometimes you have to be downright merciless about it.

Think about it — I’ve got a lot of albums I dearly love, nearly every damn track, but by the same token I’ve got a whole bunch more where I always listen and think, “oh, this would be so great if, say, it was only songs 1, 4, 5, 9, and 12, and they tossed out the rest.” This gets even worse when it comes to musicians who A) write all the goddamn time and B) spend years cranking out a gigantic pile of songs for each album.

Everybody wants their magnus opus, sure, but the vast majority of the time, what you get instead is Use Your Illusion, Vols. 1 & 2: some great, great songs, surrounded by a bloated mass of “eh.”

I say this to explain why I find myself admiring the hell out of Geographer (aka Mike Deni) so damn much for his new EP, Alone Time. Deni spent two full years writing songs for the EP, supposedly churning out a whopping 122 songs…and somehow, amazingly, he was able to cull that down to a mere five. (Well, okay, a mere seven if you count bonus tracks “Something’s Missing” and “Is It Ever Enough,” but still.)

As somebody who used to write songs himself, that blows me away. I was barely able to scrape together a good dozen songs over the same period of time, and I don’t think I threw out more than one or two; Deni scrapped (or at least postponed) 115 of his. That’s freaking incredible, to me, and it speaks to Deni’s singleminded determination to only put the Geographer name on songs that he really, truly, absolutely believes in.

And with Alone Time, that determination shows through brightly. The five (er, seven) songs on the EP are finely-crafted, pitch-perfect gems, each and every one of ’em, from the swooning synths of “So Low” to the throwback pop of “Something’s Missing” to the dark stomp of “Foolish”. It’s great stuff, with Deni mining all across the pop spectrum and showing his love for the whole ball of wax.

“Read My Mind” starts things off fragile and ethereal but has a sneaky little bit of soul that peeks in through the cracks in those nigh-impenetrable walls of electropop synth; it makes me think of Twin Shadow at points, and that’s no bad thing, because the two’ve always felt like spiritual brethren to me. Then there’s “Something’s Missing,” which is strutting and confident despite the title, and which wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a radio-pop album from the late ’90s.

“Foolish” is murkier and deeper, with a heavier pulse to it and a delivery that brings to mind a more-danceable M83. Then there’s “Is It Ever Enough,” all crystalline yearning and “breathing,” in-and-out basslines.

The EP ends, appropriately enough, with “So Low,” which sees Deni seemingly confused as to how he got to where is. It’s packed full of intense longing, not to mention a ton of burbling, retro-tinged keys and synth washes, with the occasional EDM-style break thrown in to break things up a bit. It’s a great closer to the EP, which means that the two “bonus” tracks, “Alone Together” and “Lonely,” always throw me off somewhat. To their credit, they’re both damn fine songs in their own right, particularly “Lonely,” which is a sweet, sweet take on an ’80s-pop-sounding ballad.

So here’s the moral of the story, friends: more is not always more; sometimes if you’re willing to be brutally honest with what you do and the art you make, you can carve it down into something that’s truly worthwhile, something that people will remember. That’s what Geographer’s done here, and the result is wonderful.