Slauson Malone - Excelsior (LP) - White Vinyl

Slauson Malone 1’s Excelsior landed on October 6, 2023, on Warp Records, and it feels like an album that lets you walk into a room already in motion. Jasper Marsalis, known from the boundary‑slipping New York collective Standing on the Corner, leans into a language he’s been building for years, but this time the contours are sharper, the emotions closer to the surface. The collage impulses are still there, with cuts that flip from intimate guitar and hushed voice to sudden bursts of strings or drum splatter, yet the sequencing gives the whole thing a patient, breathing shape. It plays less like a scrapbook and more like a film with jump cuts, each scene arriving with its own light and air.

What stands out first is the way acoustic instruments sit next to electronics without fuss. You hear close‑miked guitar, room‑tone piano, grainy tape textures, and vocals that feel almost confessional, then a clipped beat barges in and reframes everything. The shifts can be abrupt but they seldom feel random. Marsalis has a knack for tension and release that comes from jazz instincts, even when there isn’t a solo in sight. You hear it in how a phrase is allowed to hang, how a progression refuses to resolve, how a tiny loop becomes a pulse that carries you to the next idea.

If you came to Excelsior looking for easy genre tags, you’ll leave with a handful and none of them will fit. There’s avant‑folk in the skeletal guitar songs, art‑rap in the cadence and cut‑and‑paste logic, chamber music in the string voicings, and a painter’s sense of negative space. That breadth makes sense given the lineage. Standing on the Corner’s work with artists like Solange and Earl Sweatshirt carved out a lane for this kind of world building, and Marsalis pushes it further here, stripping away the posse energy in favor of something more intimate and exacting.

The writing can be cryptic, but it never feels coy. When the voice slips into a near whisper, details sharpen. A stray line lands like a diary note, then vanishes under a wave of distortion. You end up leaning in, catching these little fragments about love, memory, and self‑mythology. It’s the kind of record that invites replay not for a big hook, but for the way small moments keep shifting context. That quality is why Excelsior picked up strong notices from places like Pitchfork, The Guardian, and Stereogum, outlets that have followed Slauson Malone’s shape‑shifting path and recognized the step change in focus here.

Warp is the right home for this. The label’s history with artists who blur form and texture gives Excelsior a fitting frame, and the production choices reward close listening. Headphones reveal the seams and scuffs that give these pieces life, the breath before a take, a chair creak, the way a sample’s decay smudges into room noise. On speakers, the low end has a subtle throb that keeps even the quietest passages grounded. It’s a record that makes you want to own a copy you can live with, which is my not‑so‑subtle nudge to seek out Excelsior vinyl if you get the chance.

For crate diggers, this sits in that sweet spot next to late‑night Laurel Halo, the softer corners of Dean Blunt, and the most inward Earl cuts, though it never sounds like an echo. Marsalis’s signature move is the cut that feels like a thought interrupting itself, and he uses it to sketch a whole interior world. That also makes it a great conversation piece for the shelf. If you’re browsing a Melbourne record store or scrolling shops that ship vinyl records Australia wide, keep an eye on the experimental section and the Warp bin. It pops up, then disappears, because word of mouth carries records like this.

If you collect, Slauson Malone vinyl tends to hold its mystique, and Excelsior sits right at the point where that mystique meets reach. You can hear why someone who only knows him by reputation would jump in here. The album gives you an entry point, then quietly scrambles your map. While you’re at it, it’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole and buy Slauson Malone records online, since the back catalog deepens the story and Slauson Malone albums on vinyl tend to reveal new layers with time and better speakers.

Excelsior rewards patience, but it doesn’t demand homework. It breathes, it startles, it leaves room for you. By the final stretch you may not be able to hum a single melody, yet you’ll remember a feeling, the way a guitar line trailed off or a voice clipped on a syllable and turned a thought inside out. That’s the trick this album pulls. It turns fragile ideas into something durable, the sort of record you reach for on nights when silence feels too loud and everything else feels too obvious.