FUR Earns Some Nice Props From The Guardian, Even If, Yet Again, Bryce Isbell's Project Gets Tagged With The Old "Chillwave" Term

Listen: I get that there's a buzz around the term "chillwave" (nee GorillaVsBearcore). Really, I do. It's fun. It's hip. It's the coolest of cool.

But there's pretty much nothing about FUR's instrumental songs that evokes the term. Not to us here at DC9 HQ, at least. It's not especially dance-y. It's not especially sample-based and sun-warped.

It's something else.

And yet here we are, with pretty much everyone--and now even The Guardian, which named Dentonite Bryce Isbell's bedroom project its new band of the day on Friday--smacking the term on FUR's new release, Witches. Even weirder, The Guardian says that it exists in the "dancier end of the chillwave spectrum," then hedges its bets by saying it recalls "some distant memory of ambient techno or IDM (Intelligent Dance Music)."

I don't want to get into some sort of semantic genre argument here; we've been calling FUR's music "electro-trance" pretty much as a joke, but mostly because we couldn't come up with anything else. (Apparently Isbell's get some reasoning as to why it's not electro-trance, which apparently is a real genre and not something we thought we made up way too late one night while sitting around the campfire, but whatever). Really? It's just ambient electro. And very good ambient electro, at that. Which is why all this attention is rightfully coming Isbell's way.

I guess what I'm saying is this: One Alan Palomo collaboration--despite the Internet's belief--does not make a band a chillwave band. And that's OK.

(Seriously, though: Is this about as inside baseball a post as you've ever seen or what? And all I wanted to do was congratulate Isbell on his Guardian nod. Yeesh.)