Casey Louis makes a big entrance with his debut album ‘The Secret Joke’. Written in the aftermath of love, loss, and self-searching following a move to Los Angeles, the album is an inward-looking document that feels larger than the circumstances of its bedroom-studio origins. The Secret Joke opens with the atmospheric “Set-Up”, a spacious track with a deceptively spacious sound that suggests a stage being set, a curtain being pulled back, a state of mind that will guide the listener through the entire album. “The Company of Self” is a song that circles its point with questions about what it’s like to sit with yourself, to have to face yourself. “Ego”, a track with more tightly wound production and vocal delivery and more pointed lyrical phrasing that suggests an artist getting a little more comfortable with cutting close to the bone.
“Half-Life” is a bit more gutting, existing in the space between morbidity and reticence. The emotional pull of the song is dark and heavy, the production is swelling and cascading, dissolving like sand through fingers. “Synthetic Smile” evokes the smile people give when they want to appear calm in the face of uncertainty. “Human Error” is more bluntly honest about that uncertainty, more starkly vocal about recognizing one’s mistakes and vulnerabilities. “Coming Down” is a spacey, low-fi track with a meditative gravitational pull on it, with layering that gives it a hypnotic, cinematic sweep. “Uncanny Valley” is more strident and more experimental, more expressive of the uncanny echo chamber effect of life in an over-digitized world. The sflow-build of “Build” itself is hypnotic and constructive-sounding, with the album’s catchiest, most forward-moving bassline. In comparison, “Slow News Day” is something of an understated palate cleanser. “Better Off Alone” is a bit more bittersweet but still almost triumphant in its vision of isolation, not as a sad state of affairs but as an act of self-preservation.
“Away From It All” is a more spacious version of that idea, more expansive, more cinematic, more evocative of the wide open skies of the open road, or at least an interior soundscape of the feeling of leaving behind. “Don’t Fall Asleep” is an assertion of a sound philosophy, one that Casey. The closing track “Punchline” is of a piece, wry, moody, and memorable. Less an actual punchline, it leaves you with more questions than answers but, really, how many songs actually do that anymore? Casey Louis’s ‘The Secret Joke’ succeeds because it feels personal and because it works so hard to immerse the listener in an audio world that is as vivid, as sonically ambitious as the songs suggest the artist is inside. This is a debut album that doesn’t just announce a new artist but a fully formed one that has already mastered a sound and style worth the effort to really listen closely to his music.
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