Midnight Menu

Jennifer Lee’s career as TOKiMONSTA tends to be dominated by one big story: her career-jeopardizing brush with a brain condition in 2015 that temporarily left her unable to comprehend music, then using her recovery time to record Lune Rouge — which subsequently notched a Best Dance/Electronic Album Grammy nomination in 2017. But before that strange turn of fate, before her collaborations with Anderson .Paak or her remixes for the likes of Beck and Duran Duran or her gig co-hosting the last ever Low End Theory in 2018, her debut full-length Midnight Menu made her a more-than-worthy pillar of the L.A. beat scene. As much as that milieu was defined by its more adventurously weird glitch/IDM/dance fusionists, TOKiMONSTA’s music here is more straight to the point — a melange of ’70s and ’80s funk, disco, and electro molded into forms that couldn’t really exist until the 2010s. And she’s not afraid to lift from recognizable sounds in part because she takes joy in finding that they still have the power to surprise. Peaches & Herb’s “Shake Your Groove Thing” is closer to wedding-dance fodder than a deep-crate pull, but the way “Death By Disco” slows its familiar riff down just enough to dial back its frenetic energy for something a bit slinkier and percussively nuanced should’ve made her the envy of anyone trafficking in balearic beats. “Gamble” is Philadelphia International romantic balladry as glimpsed through a lava lamp, boosting its billowy glide with the kind of dense, rolling boom-clap beats perfect for when the head you want to nod is feeling lighter than usual. And on some of the most effervescent tracks on Midnight Menu — the patchcord-tangling vintage-synth boogie of “Look-A-Like,” the woozily upscaled ’64 Motown torch-song soul of Shuanise feature “Solitary Joy,” the viscous, bristling-yet-warm analog funk iridescence of “Lucid Waking” — she makes her studious eclecticism seem like spontaneous second nature.