By Sonya Peres
The self-titled album from R U REAL, an experimental trio hailing from our beloved Montreal, begins with “Mom & Dad (I love myself)”. The 3:00 minute track carefully sets the mood for the entire album, with an eerie, yet surprisingly comfortable underlying sentiment. This music seems to straddle the line between pure lucidity and absolute confusion.
R U REAL consists of artists JLK, Ylang Ylang and Sarah Haag – all of whom are also involved in other projects. Their album, released in August, consists of 8 tracks layered with drums, synths, doom, gloom and feelings you didn’t even know existed. “Nemesis” (feat. Cosí e Cosí), uses a mixture of sounds and distorted voices that come together so perfectly it’s like diving head first into a somewhat terrifying, robotic themed dream, and you don’t want to leave. In fact, the entire album is like a dream in retrospect: you imagine the sounds and it doesn’t seem like something that would work in full consciousness, but somehow it does. The sounds of R U REAL seem to ride effortlessly on a wave of subconsciousness. I suppose R U REAL is aptly named; are they real? Is any of this real?
