Claremont 56 boss Paul Mudd and B.J. Smith’s debut album and instant Balearic classic Blue River is a marvellously free and easy nine-track collection of club-adjacent downtempo beats, instrumental soul and electronic/acoustic hybrids, with hints of folk, psychedelic, disco, soft rock and more. And if that sounds like an overly heady mix, it still all fits together perfectly, the various musical elements all possessing some kind of hard-to-define but definitely-existing common quality that through sonic transmogrification creates a beautiful, peaceful and palliative album which also possess rhythmic drive and progression too. 

Blue River has the (soft) power to transport the listener to a sonic place that’s neither retro or futurist, but instead to an extremely pleasant, chronologically-free-floating location of its very own.