Gus Dapperton | Yellow and Such EP Review

Playful dream pop from a confident debutant

At several points in Matthew Dillon Cohen’s cinematic music video for Dapperton’s debut single, ‘I'm Just Snacking’, we see Dapperton, decked in oversize, vintage-buttoned down jacket, gyrating to his music via cupped headphones and a portable CD player. As he traipses down New York’s Chinatown district, there’s something immediately infectious about his style and musical sensibility. His songs, self-described as ‘80s-influenced and kind of dreamy’ are laced with lifting Roland synth pieces and earthy vocals.

His debut EP, which dropped on the 3rd August, is the first containment of that. Each track is gorgeous, and considering Dapperton has declared ‘World class cinema’ as something that inspires him to create, each musical piece feels well-adjusted into the whole, like a well-paced film, where no scene feels superfluous. ‘Miss Glum & the Pursuit of Falling’ features Beatlesesque chord progressions with interlacing vocal arrangements reminiscent of Bradford Cox, punched into with a gorgeous strings sample. In ‘Gum, Toe and Sole’ (self-tagged under the ‘surrealism’ genre in the SoundCloud upload) the vocal hook, carried by the bass, runs throughout the song, over his raspy tones of heartache in the verses and chorus.

His songs are sexy without being self-centred and confident without eliminating the possibility of doubt. His future work could only get more interesting.