Family Portrait

It's an album you can easily disappear into from one of electronic music's most thrilling new talents.

Family Portrait is an uncommonly original album, keeping listeners guessing while making a significant, sometimes unexpected emotional impact.

There are no dull moments, but if there’s even a brief drop in intensity, it should only be used to reflect on the energy you probably just felt.

Weatherall gleefully proves there's life for house music beyond four-to-the-floor bangers. [Aug 2018, p.114]

Varied in style, but with a unified vision, Family Portrait is a big success for Ross From Friends, a very personal and authentic piece of work.

Something about its bleary-eyed shuffle, smooth jazz accents and chipmunk vocals is ineffably familiar and intimate. By drawing on memories and relationships for inspiration, Weatherall conveys emotion more convincingly than ever before.

While it might sometimes lose that heart, when it rediscovers its path again, it becomes an incredibly immersive and exciting album.

The tone is music darker, the textures are much more defined, the beats are often quite huge, but the melodies/instruments/moods are familiar to anyone who listens to music on the periphery of nostalgia: vaporwave, Actress, Lee Gamble, etc.

Eight of the twelve tracks here surpass a four-minute run time and few would sound as good on a dancefloor as they do on a laptop. So to ask the audience to remain patient for the record’s 55 minutes proves a tall order, especially for music as subdued as this. Still, Weatherall demonstrates an indisputable talent for compiling and arranging a diverse array of sounds into one cohesive song on Family Portrait.

His music is closer to an upgrade of the wigglier, more luxurious end of Megadog/ Megatripolis 90s clip-on dreadlock rave, or more recently the hallucination holiday postcards of Call Super, than to anything genuinely raw and lo-fi like Kyle Hall, Jamal Moss or Karen Gwyer. [Aug 2018, p.66]

Weatherall has created ever more highly textured tracks, moving beyond that “old-school sound” for something denser and more contemporary. But with all of Ross’ attention to detail on Family Portrait, sometimes the tracks don’t fully cohere or else their sentiment feels half-baked.

With Family Portrait Ross From Friends (or Dr Geller as he prefers to be called) confirms enviable production skills that were already displayed on hype-building 12” releases, but is missing some songwriting nous that would have lifted the album up and made it a more consistently engaging listen.