Genre jumble

‘‘If only I could sing like Mariah does,’’ sings Peter Sagar in Like Mariah, trilling in falsetto and attempting a few of those high-pitched note clusters Carey favours. The song plays out over clucking funk bass, clinking keyboards and a syncopated beat. Sagar, who operates as Homeshake, hails from Montreal, and has a jones for slow-mo R&B. An old school buddy and former touring guitarist with Mac DeMarco, he shares his friend’s penchant for the off-kilter, the genre mash-up and the dude-esque demeanour. So he channels Frank Ocean and James Blake on the woozy Anything At All, a song in which he worries about his smartphone addiction, not traditionally a primary concern in the R&B canon. Sagar has his moments: the tumble of a melody in the chorus of Another Thing; the Twilight Zone tinkling of All Night Long. But his tendency to warp everything to a kind of sonic molasses, combined with the inclusion of a handful of short instrumental doodles, make him seem unsure about his own sound.