Mister Mellow also contains about an EP’s worth of Washed Out pop songs that deviate from the acoustic-toting, college quad aspirations of Paracosm: “Get Lost” and “Floating By” touch on the psychedelic soul and jazz that often serves as Stones Throw source material, while the cruise-disco highlight “Hard to Say Goodbye” almost sounds like a slowed-down take on Anthony Naples’ “Mad Disrespect,” showing how far Greene has come as a sample-based artist since his earliest days. Likewise, a good portion of Mister Mellow is earmarked for crate-digging reveries, with titles that read like Batman word bubbles (“Zonked,” “Instant Calm,” “Time Off”). In 2009, the most interesting chillwave drew from the warbly beat science of Stones Throw patron saints like J Dilla and Madlib. The most important development on Mister Mellow is that Washed Out has moved from Sub Pop Records and is releasing the album on Stones Throw-a label best known for weeded-out hip-hop. As a pitched-down sample slurs “I go to work, I try my best” on “Floating By,” Washed Out comes this close to quoting Toro Y Moi’s “ Blessa” and achieving chillwave singularity.
#Mellow yellow lyrics meaning full#
It’s just a deeper dive on the subject closest to his heart: the despair and boredom of an otherwise stress-free life, and how that very despair and boredom is compounded by the full awareness of being someone who doesn’t stand to lose much immediately in the current climate. This doesn’t make Mister Mellow all that different than other Washed Out releases. Given the modest demands of sensory immersion and time (about a half hour), the optimal viewing experience is “eating a salad in front of your computer during lunch,” or in five or 10 minute increments when someone can’t snoop at your cubicle. In fact, Mister Mellow might be viewed as a hero of superhuman chill who has come to save us all from the mid-afternoon blahs at work. Witness the bric-a-brac on the album cover: a Xanax bar, a toy panic button, and bumper stickers reading “Work/Life Balance,” “I Never Get a Break,” “Feeling Fine.” Mister Mellow, then, is a kind of concept album about The Way We Live.
In the multimedia set, it’s all presented through Claymation, collage, clips of guys smoking weed, and other things that tend to visually pair well with your strain of choice: clocks, geodes, cheeseburgers, and blurred out images of Greene as a youth, wearing his prom tux and assorted Georgia sports gear. Compared to the deep ocean blues of his earliest work and the “daytime psychedelia” of 2013’s Paracosm, Mister Mellow is filled with warm browns and yellows. Like Greene’s music itself, the visuals don’t ask for your undivided attention, and they don’t quite say anything new about Washed Out either. That said, in light of the more renowned recent examples of the “visual album”- Lemonade, JAY-Z’s upcoming 4:44-do not mistake this as Greene’s declaration of auteurism.
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