The ferny Brutalist cityscape on the cover of Soli City’s Poetics of a New Estate is a fine advertisement for what’s inside: curated Copenhagen vibelessness, shorn of grit but not without a certain numinous quality. Anyone who’s heard the computer-screen fantasias of ML Buch’s Suntub or the mallsoft jazz of MK Velsorf and Aase Nielsen’s Opening Night knows on some level what to expect: spiffy ’80s guitar that twangs and ripples just this side of Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” a conservatory-schooled ear for arrangement, a lack of friction that belies the spookiness rumbling underneath. Less expected are the jarring tonal shifts liable to induce whiplash across its 45 minutes — and which would seem haphazard if every single one of them wasn’t…
