Significant Soil

The second album by Iggy Romeau under the name Mister Water Wet, Significant Soil is an odd bird indeed. There’s something disjointed and discontinuous about Romeau’s compositions, as though they’re being pieced together on the fly; despite that, there’s an underlying logic here, a deeper plan that informs what Romeau does. The material on Significant Soil is comfortable in its relative nakedness – often, Romeau will let two or three elements run alongside each other, not quite intersecting but, by the end of the composition, suggesting a higher order of coherence. The piano and percussion of “Good Apple” never quite align, but feel just right for not doing so; “When Kennybrook Burned to the Ground” opens with vocal loops and clanking percussion, before a landscape pockmarked with fissures and blown-out, archaic structures unfolds between your ears. It all resolves with the shuddering, Klimek or Marsen Jules-esque blisstronics of “Losing Blood.”