ADD Agency

You’d be forgiven for thinking that ADD Agency consisted of more than one member – not only because the name suggests involvement from numerous individuals but also because the style is so flexible, as if the blending of numerous minds. Will Mora from El Paso is ADD Agency and his latest record, ‘Gemstone Radar’, is a Bowie-esque experimental electronic album that is striving to excite and entertain across three generational evolutions of music culture.

The ‘Gemstone Radar’ shtick is heavily influenced by 80s synth pop and psychedelic rock, festooned with content that is as enigmatic as the ever-modulating vocals of the oracular musician. ‘Gemstone Radar’ doesn’t have a preponderance of wordy verses – in fact, the song with the most lyrics is Mora’s cover of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint It Black’. The pop paradigm has always been that the simplest music always sounds the best and ‘Gemstone Radar’ is very molecular yet it’s enriched with aural anomalies designed to titillate like never before. ADD Agency is clearly enjoying in the experimentation on this album.

Typically when dealing with an artist who has to distribute his or her manpower across several aspects of the music-making process, there’s always an element that is badly neglected – whether it be the song-writing, or the musicality, or the entire thing due to a lack of means and/or time. But with Gemstone Radar, you initially don’t get that same impression such is the freshness of lyrical ideas and the variety of the musical choices. On the first few songs – the aforementioned ‘Bootypop’, ‘Sex On The Side’ and ‘Set Me Free’ in particular – the arrangements and instrumentation are crisp and dynamic, so much so that you struggle to recognise Mora’s specific model. But as you continue to listen, you start to get similar meat on the rigid bones. Whilst it’s always good for a musician to have a clearly defined identity, it’s difficult to do so without releasing material that sounds samey sometimes – ‘Gemstone Radar’ toes the precarious line between innovation and a bag of stale chestnuts.

It’s been said that this project has been three years in the making. Without knowing the frequency of dedicated time he spent on it, you can either feel like “yep, something this good sounds like it would take years of honing” or “yes, its lackadaisical sound matches the glacial pace of its producer”. But there is a fundamental appeal from its sheer audaciousness, if nothing else.