Pictureplane: Dark Rift

House music can sometimes feel interchangeable, and it’s often described with the same terminology: “surreal,” “psychedelic,” etc., etc. Pictureplane—the house-pop project of 24-year-old performance artist Travis Egedy—has all these qualities, but often quite a bit more, mostly as a result of sheer attitude. Where many house artists take an inhumanly slick, coolly removed approach, Egedy slowly builds his debut, Dark Rift, toward a feisty, sweaty, fiery explosion that’s actually exciting. Unfortunately, it takes a while to get there, and the first third of the album thumps along to the kind of predictable, formulaic house bounce that prevents Abercrombie & Fitch shoppers from hearing their own thoughts. Things get novel when Egedy’s scattered beats fall into a poppier electronic wall of sound: “Goth Star” layers a glittering electronic drizzle over a dense throb, the fun “Cyclical Cyclical” is a frenetically paced whirlpool of rhythm, and “Time Teens” sounds like sped-up throwback Moby, with stabbing, stunted synth added to a heavy drum punch. Having toured with Health and collaborated with Zach Condon of Beirut, Pictureplane intends to break the mold, and by the close of Dark Rift, with “Transparent Now” shimmering like a hazy summer horizon and “True Ruin” sparkling into the sunset, the album offers quite a few dizzy, frizzy electro-pop pleasures.