Calvin Love

Only once with every blue moon comes an artist that seems so familiar yet out of space as Calvin Love. On Super Future, his first album for Arts & Crafts, the young charmer from Edmonton, Alberta, steeps songs of psychedelic wisdom in celestial sensuality. Calvin Love arrives an enigma, a strutting, crooning contradiction: as menacing as he is magnetic, like love and murder wrapped together in a trench coat. With coolness that defies contrivance, Love links sounds and images of science-fiction vintage with an auspicious version of the future. Calvin does it all with convincing ease, a crooked handsomeness belying his wide-eyed honesty and the curios experimentation of these tunes. First single “Daydream” makes landfall with near-tropical humidity: cavernous, scuttling drum lines echo Calvin’s lilting vocals and stalactite guitar phrasing, exposing how nimbly he moves from sunny to gritty climes. The urgent “Creepin” races at a siren’s pace, with bursts of fractured guitar framing its more primal, animistic, punk rock personality. The music is at all times seductive: disordered but intuitive, faulted if not feeling for just the right fractions of distortion and balladry. Performed and recorded entirely by Calvin Love at his Cool Creep Studios in Edmonton, Super Future distinguishes him from the lineage of hometown cronies like Mac Demarco, TOPS, Alex Calder, and Sean Nicholas Savage. Suave and demented, nostalgic and otherworldly, with Super Future Calvin Love casts a black light shadow on the white of sun-soaked skies.