TRACKLISTING LP 1 Panoramic 2 Get The Message 3 Lucky 4 On Telegraph 5 Another Tomorrow 6 Without a Plan 7 First Call 8 By this Sound 9 Stratus 10 February Seattle-based producer Jeff McIlwains work has long inhabited the fertile border zone between electronic pop and experimental electronic music ” its a place thats home to music that has both a brain and a heart, and McIlwains been exploring its boundaries for the best part of a decade now. The Waiting Room is his third full-length release for Ghostly International under the moniker Lusine, and his first album since 2009s A Certain Distance. As with all McIlwains work as Lusine, this is a record thats characterized by both diversity and coherency. Its tracks traverse a variety of sonic landscapes, from the widescreen atmospherics of appropriately-titled opening track Panoramic through the digital soul arrangement of Electronics Get the Message and the club-friendly bounce of First Call to the slow-building Detroit-inflected closer February". But for all The Waiting Rooms eclecticism, its also notable that it plays out as a coherent whole, with McIlwains deft production creating the sense of a single, logical journey ” an album, rather than a simple collection of tracks. It also continues the excursions into vocal-led tracks that characterized A Certain Distance ” exactly half of The Waiting Rooms ten tracks employ vocalists, most notably the aforementioned Get the Message, wherein guest vocalist and wife Sarah McIlwain makes Bernard Sumners words her own: I dont know where to begin / Living in sin, she sings calmly, How can you talk? / Look where youve been. As a whole, this is an album thats both cerebral and visceral, a record thats both rewarding of a serious headphone session and also warm and melodic enough to make listening as engaging in an emotional sense as it is in an intellectual one. Many artists flirt with these two extremities of electronic music; few tie them together as well as McIlwain does.