About

Music as a refuge, music as stress relief, music as a drug or an adjunct to drugs: Ernest Greene, the songwriter who records as Washed Out, has always embraced those functions with a hint of ambivalence. His third Washed Out album, with the self-mocking title “Mister Mellow,” both proclaims its anodyne intentions and reveals misgivings behind them.

It’s not just music for easy listening; it’s presented as something to pacify a bored, bummed-out work force. “Life goes by each and every day,” Mr. Greene sings in “Burn Out Blues.” “I need some time so I can find the way/to slow down, relax and clear my head.”

Washed Out’s songs have been plush and blurred, a little melted around the edges, ever since Mr. Greene inaugurated the minimovement that became known as chillwave with Washed Out’s first EPs in 2009. Mr. Greene’s early songs gave sampled 1970s pop and disco an echoey, wavery resurrection, as if yearning for the hedonistic 1970s that he was born too late — in 1982 — to experience.

Successive Washed Out releases expanded Mr. Greene’s vocabulary across additional decades, incorporating live instruments and invoking psychedelia, trip-hop and ambient electronica: anything that could dissolve into a midtempo haze. - The New York Times