Time passes erratically when I‰’m listening to the Ekstasis, the latest Julia Holter album. Take the opening track, “Marienbad‰Û, for example. For the longest time, I didn‰’t bother to check the track length of this song, but I had the hardest time estimating how long the song lasted. There were times where I thought that “Marienbad‰” must be around ten minutes, it seemed like a necessary amount of time for Holter to cycle among the song‰’s many movements. Other times, I put the estimate at about 4 minutes, times when I was listening to “Marienbad‰” and hearing an ornate, precisely constructed pop song; every few seconds seemed to introduce a new melodic hook, and the minutes rushed by.

For the record, “Marienbad‰” is five and a half minutes long, so my more accurate estimate came when I was listening in with a pop music mindset. This seems appropriate; it‰’s hard to deny that Ekstasis is a pop album, and Holter herself insists that she is a pop musician. But it‰’s pop music that‰’s been abstracted, songs that are deconstructed into individual ideas, recombined, and the introduced at a furious clip. Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno are two precursors to her style, especially when you consider Holter‰’s use of ambiance to explore pop music‰’s characteristic structures. Arrangements drift in the background and suddenly snap into focus: the turning point of “Marienbad‰” comes at the halfway mark when a straightforward 4/4 beat enters the mix unexpectedly, anchoring the choral vocals that seem to spray off in different directions.

The song begins with incantatory, madrigal-style singing, so it‰’s almost jarring to hear the familiarity of the drumbeat when it arrives. Holter scatters these little revelatory transitions throughout the album, adding and subtracting from her songs in a way that makes Ekstasis sound different with every listen. It‰’s a cerebral album, though I wouldn‰’t call it a challenging. Ekstasis rewards you graciously for the attention that you do dedicate to it. Its pleasures seem inexhaustible, leading Ekstasis to sit atop the list of my favorite 2012 albums.

By Brian Waligorski