Ernest Rareberrg returns with the indefinable “Blimp”

Over the course of the last five years, Ernest Rareberrg has carved out a small niche for himself with a modest handful of track releases. With only half a dozen singles on streaming, on top of a YouTube music video for an otherwise Soundcloud-exclusive older track, Rareberrg seems to be slowly building up an artistic identity for himself. His earlier releases give an inkling of the sounds that have been floating around the artist, with some fitting snugly alongside dazed, bedroom-pop contemporaries, and others playing with N.E.R.D.-like rap-rock.

However, between his last track, “Pirelli”, released just a few months ago in March, and “Blimp”, the Brooklyn-based artist has clearly begun to shift into a significantly more solid vision for his work. Where in the past his sound reconfigured from single-to-single, trying to find his pocket of artistic ambrosia, now Rareberrg has managed to create a unique, singular style, one that he describes as “darker and more cohesive, emotionally aligned to where his current feelings lie.”

The result of this development on the track “Blimp” is a hard one to describe. A song about “the constant battle of the self,” it, perhaps appropriately, melds multiple conflicting sounds into one cohesive whole. "Whether that amounts to love or hate of the self, the person going through that won’t come out of it the same. This leads to bouts of self-consciousness, insecurity, brief blips of happiness, etc”, Rareberrg explains.

Electronic drum-rolls (veering towards drum-and-bass) and warped guitar-like sound-effects all come together on the track in cheerfully irregular fashion. With his own favourite artists scattered between eras, from Komeda to Bob Dylan, it's easy to appreciate the ambitious plain of influences he is picking from. Over the top of it all, Rareberrg switches between odd falsettos and spoken-singing to narrate this tale of inner turmoil, using the imagery of the ‘blimp’ and of a city - no doubt inspired by his own New York.

Whilst the song is a fast two minutes, it casts Rareberrg as an intriguing and experimental new voice in music. On top of his recent support slot for the equally off-beat and quirky UK duo Jockstrap on their US tour, with the release of “Blimp”, it’s clear that Ernest Rareberrg has only just begun to hit his stride creatively. Given the breadth of sounds he’s been playing with, there’s still plenty of places left for him to go.