Last month Portland’s Boreen released Cartoons, a sleepy invitation to fade out of your own reality and saturate in the disconnect. Boreen is the solo project of Morgan O’Sullivan, who also plays in Dog Thieves and Happy Dagger. Two summers ago he started recording music in his hometown of Oakland, California using only guitar, bass, toy instruments (including a Buzz Lightyear keyboard he says he “found on the street instead of getting a job”), and voice memos he’d recorded on his phone. Last summer he released his first EP, Breakfast—a delicate, sometimes Sufjan Stevens-like approach to experimental pop.
Cartoons‘ nine tracks of syrupy dream-pop melt into each other gently, but a current of pain pulses through each song. O’Sullivan says the album is largely inspired by his younger sister, who recently mourned the passing of a close friend. To cope she’d spend all her time with friends watching Disney movies. “The talking animals, songs, and bright colors all distracted them, if only for a moment, from the terror of what was going on,” he says. “It was heartbreaking, but also so sweet and innocent that they somehow did manage to make life pause for a second.”
On this new release, O’Sullivan explores the aching pain of being present when real life is unbearable. While his sister watched cartoons with her friends, he tuned out by experimenting with toy instruments. Despite its airiness, Cartoons sounds like a tug of war between adulthood and O’Sullivan—you can almost hear the rope burn. “Iya” and “Chocolate Milk” are the album’s most blissful, dazed moments of escapism, but standout track “Halley’s Comet” is anything but dream-pop. It begins with a sample of someone warning, “Please be careful, you don’t want to be in the way when my laser goes off,” before ripping open a galaxy of self-deprecation, as O’Sullivan admonishes himself for goofing around on the internet instead of watching a once-in-a-lifetime passing of Halley’s Comet.