Words by Kyle Smith//Illustration by Jared Drew Moody
The implicit metaphor of an album titled Love and Other Planets is to either describe that most celestial of feelings as a monstrous, orbiting physical entity, or to question the whole of existence in the same way we wonder if calling her back tomorrow is too soon.

Really, Adem only had to release “Spirals,” the penultimate track on his latest album, to announce his beautiful diffidence and his record’s earthly aims. His half-whine echoes an acoustic guitar plucked with genuine tenderness, comparing grade-school cootie shots to that extraterrestrial feeling of connecting with another: “_You marked the back of my hand/You drew a heart, and some tiny dots/And a spiral which reminded me of the Milky Way/And it made me think if our galaxy and Andromeda felt like you and me…_”

This run-on continues effortlessly for three gorgeous minutes, continuing to detail astral ecstasy in miniscule detail. “_Galactic, tectonic shifts in my chest/And behind my eyes
And yet the smallest vibration/Like the touch of your pen/Makes my hair stand on end._”

I know, I know—reading this, your natural inclination is to ridicule this starry-eyed love letter. It’s easy enough: these lyrics mathematically pair insignificant details with constellations, drawing out obvious meaning: the universe isn’t as vast as we thought, it’s the little moments that are important, thank you Raymond Carver, etc.

This is totally acceptable. “There is a heavily laid-on metaphor relationship going,” Adem admits. “I try to make music that’s universally intimate. I try to incorporate the incredibly personal in a very general way.” Or: Adem bucks highfalutin philosophizing for middle-brow truths. “Spirals,” and the rest of Love and Other Planets, is stuffed with modesty and wonder, two emotions too often missing in independent music and so very present in Adem, a gracious Brit who corrected my inevitable mispronunciation of his name (AH-dem) with not a hint of annoyance. If anything, he was apologizing for its low-to-modest level of difficulty.

The album oozes that same etiquette and politeness; “Spirals,” in particular, is a heartbreaking love song that is also 100% positive. No theatrical sadness or emotional outpourings, just a simple postcard narration. It never feels like Adem is actively connecting his relationship to the orbit of the planets or comet dust or the physics of 2001. If anything, the acoustic guitar is the most otherworldly contrast to Adem’s overarching concept: the rest of the album titters of bells and bouncy sounds to commemorate heavenly beauty, while the simple lesson of “Spirals” is that all that makes life worth living is found in the sky, on our hands, and in a guitar.

Pardon my own loquaciousness in discussing Love and Other Planets; its just such a pleasure to use astronomical terms again. Outer space went out of fashion sometime in July 1998, with the unprecedented alignment of the Beastie Boys “Intergalactic” video, the post-_OK Computer_ comedown, and the release of Wild Wild West. I remember George W. Bush’s 2004 plans to return to the moon being greeted with public ridicule, a lot of which was probably fueled by common sense but also a collective feeling like, “Dude, we’ve got enough going on down here. Will Smith has taken care of things three Fourth of July’s in a row, ‘kay?”

Many concept albums are several songs telling one large story. Love and Other Planets is twelve songs about the same thing. Adem is unpretentious and straightforward in titling these suckers; LaOP and his sparkling debut, Homesongs, are defined by their titles. Homesongs inverts _LaOP_’s stargazing by focusing on a singular place; “Home is where your heart comes from,” he sings on _Homesongs_’ standout “Everything You Need,” “but what do you do when your heart’s gone with everything you need?”

_LaOP_’s “These Lights are Meaningful” offers a nice response: “I know that I’ve not been the same since the day we walked around and marveled at the firmament.” As far as songs about looking at the sky and finding yourself go, “These Lights are Meaningful” is about as predictable as you’d imagine: our narrator finds meaning in the stars, “a message writ out large,” “lest we forget ourselves,” “we have a reason here,” even “the Zodiac gives clues to the wealth of all that once we knew.”

But this song’s appeal is, again, Adem’s passion. This song is imbued with actual wonder, with no irony and no bullshit. Heart-on-sleeve it ain’t, because there’s no personal angst, druggy haze or distracting depression: just open-eyed stupefaction. Just Adem and his sweetie sharing a blanket under the stars.

“I didn’t want to make a concept album,” he told me from California, where he’s wrapping up a tour with fellow Domino artist Juana Molina. “I wrote a few songs and realized there was a theme emerging.” Love and Other Planets is “about people, and people feeling,” Adem said, “and I’m talking about them through the meaning of space. It’s the vocabulary I’m using—it’s the vocabulary of the cosmos. Essentially the tiniest things can seem more than the most important things in existence.”

All this attention to Adem’s lyrics, with nary a thought toward his music. His compositions are consistently solid with few deviations toward the transcendent or the dull. “Spirals” is an obvious exception to the sounds of the rest of the album, which pulse around acoustic guitars and the exciting flourishes of a full-band. Opener “Warning Call” and the excellent “Something’s Going to Come” peak in these uptempo movements.

“Launch Yourself’s” repetitive, multi-tracked vocals are annoying, but only mildly so—they’re a reminder that Adem is not out to astonish anyone. His lyrics, talky as they are, are suitable for his impressive gamut of instruments, but he’s no show-off. Each song’s instruments sound like a simple puzzle: they’re impossible to identify on their own, but the overall portrait is agreeable. Even when Adem is showing off — each line of “X is for Kisses” progresses alphabetically, e.g. “Jars of/Kisses/Left on the/Mantle,” with the clever exception of the titular (and always-difficult) X — it’s a simple, obvious, lovely game.

This is the “musical modesty” I’m trying to pin on Adem — Love and Other Planets as a huge concept album executed with humility, not grandiose gestures or sweeping narratives. And Adem seems apologetic about the whole thing: his website is full of extensive confessions for things as trivial as canceling a show or using a word like “hypnagogic.” He is protecting the meaning of his album through calculated reticence: he doesn’t want to change your life. He just wants you to listen.

“Everything I do in my life, musically and in my whole life — Adem, Fridge [the seminal post-rock outfit he was in with Four Tet aka Kieran Hebden] — I think it’s essential to be challenging, even though I’m talking about music being generally accepted and widely listened to,” he says. “I want people to work. And I think that’s really important — the trick is getting something that’s complicated.” His is a music that “grows” on you, and Adem seems to have a wily awareness of this — “_Homesongs_ has proven itself to really last,” he says in a rare moment of candor, “and people have gone back and back to it over the years. The more effort you put into a record, the more you get out of it, and the more excited you get.

“I do that through detail, and through things that are so obvious, but not initially—through things that snake their way through consciousness.”

Love and Other Planets was, like Homesongs, recorded entirely in Adem’s bedroom, “on a busted up computer,” he says, almost apologetically. “I can only record one channel at a time, only on two microphones.” What’s so remarkable is how grand and well-produced LaOP seems. It sounds like a studio effort with a full band, not the slight, sketchy, and cheap sounds so many other bedrooms produce. Laptop pop is one genre Adem is grouped into; he also discussed (with a modicum of frustration) being grouped with “post-folk, freak-folk, nu-folk,” and a dozen other silly genres. I find Adem’s style is perhaps best understood by checking his playbills: Molina, Animal Collective, Battles, Akron/Family, Vetiver.

In criticism, and in life, we’re too often looking for the easy escape—the life-changing chord change or lyrical turn to spell it all out. That’s not Adem. He masks his revelations with midtempo bashfulness and hands-in-pockets honesty. To assign love as Planet X, an orbiting body with its own gravitational pull, is a big stupid irresistible metaphor. “I think all of humanity feels this concept of awe and magic, and I try to put a lot of that into my music,” Adem said. “I think this universe is something incredible, and it’s beautiful finding someone to share the enormity of things.”