Review
Stephen Bruner’s six-year absence hasn't dulled his penchant for combining dizzying fusion with existential dread. On Distracted, the virtuosic bassist tackles modern hyper-connectivity, tempering his chaotic post-genre stylings into a surprisingly cohesive sequence. The album channels heartbreak through a glossy blend of yacht rock, psych-soul, and cosmic R&B, finding spaces where grief and punchlines intersect.
Critics are largely captivated by how Bruner refines these impulses. The Quietus praises him for transmuting "our collective exhaustion, our grief, and our hyper-connectivity" into a "masterpiece of progressive R&B." Sonically, it leans into polished, retro-influenced textures; Paste notes that the music strikes a middle ground, "embracing the P-funk pocket and synth-led psych-jazz in equal measure."
This breezy exterior, however, masks deeper anxieties. Pitchfork highlights the album's deceptive architecture, asserting it "resembles a pop blowout at first, only to pull the shag rug out from under our feet." While PopMatters argues his "unrelentingly sophomoric sense of humor" occasionally interrupts the emotional weight of his arrangements, the broad consensus embraces Bruner exactly as he comes: messy, virtuosic, and inherently human.
