(4AD)
!!! A+ RECORDING !!!
It's a really good thing this is a blog post and not a legitimate writing assignment because I've lived with this album for the better part of a week, through roughly five and a half listens, and I still don't feel capable of articulating how I feel about it. Hope you don't mind hearing this story, but here goes: in the middle of the fourth time all the way through I had to stop in to the grocery store and heard one of my favorite John Lennon songs, "Watching the Wheels." Usually this cut always sends me into a reeling fit of nostalgia, sorrow, and joyful discussion about Lennon's lovingly domesticated message. Today it sounded lifeless, petty, dim compared to whokill. Different vernacular, different time, different purpose? All granted. But there was a time when Lennon himself with that old band of his could have that kind of effect on all other music, and still can when those songs recirculate, and in no way -- regardless of how great "Watching the Wheels" really is -- is that ability not worth praising.
tUnE-yArDs' supersonic force Merrill Garbus is a rarity indeed -- the singer-songwriter of remarkable maturity whose work also explodes with youthful life. Garbus produced the record, wrote nearly all of it (sharing a cowrite credit on four cuts), and performs the overwhelming bulk of its music, solely accompanied by bassist Nate Brenner and scattered supplemental players. But this is Garbus' world, one of stirring excitement, funk, joy, despair (not any pop-twee notion of sadness or happiness -- actual, felt depth, even when she can hardly be writing about herself), and full-force, exuberant individualism. It is like nothing else in the pop marketplace at the moment. It must be heard, and now.
Garbus' uniquely direct, even invasive approach is bracing in its clarity -- her music is so busy, so overloaded with pleasing ideas and bizarre tangents that it can take time for the curtain to lift to reveal just how expressive and beautiful it is. "Es-so," incredibly early on the album, will leave some exhausted the first time around, sounding vaguely like a malfunctioning Prince b-side, but there is so much happening in it, and once the surrender happens, the dancing takes over, and eventually all you can hear is its shimmer. One detail that will fail to escape even the curious hearing it at a comfortable distance will be that, in contrast to every stereotype of singer-songwriter genre exercises, this is body music. With only a few fleeting exceptions, every second of every song slams somehow -- throbbing, stomping, pulsing, bubbling, vibrating, marching, bumping. "Gangsta" is as original and vibrant a dance song as you will hear in 2011 or most likely 2012; it will eventually become clear that it's also witty and discomforting, but its bleeding edge on top of expansive delicacy and almost impossibly elegant sense of threat is what's really special, followed up by the teasing "Riotriot," which perverts its pleasing simple sing-song riff by building it up into menace until Garbus explodes unaccompanied with the so-wrong so-wise "THERE IS A FREEDOM IN VIOLENCE THAT I DON'T UNDERSTAND / THAT I'VE NEVER FELT BEFORE." The climax of the record, the moment that gives its assaultive ideas their purpose -- this is the now we need to know, the unfamiliar we need to embrace.
But beats are one thing. The spirited, inventive instrumentation here, uncovering alien noise from ukuleles and horns and loops and Korg keyboards and an unearthly combination thereof, plus Garbus' infectious vocals and drumming and "stick clicks" crafts a bed of sound nearly unheard of in Western music, certainly in rock & roll. But as much as Garbus engages in the sound of Tanzania, the music of which she says was a key to inspiring her harmonic process, or Jamaica, rock & roll is what this is -- a stunning deconstruction and revamping of folk and R&B conventions until all that's left is what's most rattling, most impossible to shake, most subversively moving. "You Yes You" might populate your head with pleasant Paul Simon memories, the vocals and music perfect Vampire Weekend politeness, until Garbus bursts in with a wonderfully obnoxious "Dance This Mess Around" snarl, demanding "WHAT'S THAT ABOUT!? WHAT'S THAT ABOUT!?" The barbed anti-materialism, anti-criticism of materialism rant that follows is worthy of Johnny Rotten's gleefully fucked "Bodies," only Garbus feels comfortable enough to finally let romance into her idealism and eye-rolling. "Throw your money on the ground and leave it there, you! Yes, you!" This is what is known, in our American rock context, as New Music.
Not that Garbus lacks peers, or precedent. M.I.A. is hardly a stretch, even if she'd never stand for recording an entire album (like tUnE-yArDs' debut, bIrD-bRaIns) on Audacity. But Garbus' seemingly born-in ingenuity as a songwriter more closely recalls the equally gifted Joanna Newsom, as much as Newsom has yet to exhibit the wild eclecticism whokill revels in. For sheer unblocked catharsis, I can't help thinking of Josephine Olausson from Love Is All, but whereas Olausson is clearly exorcising demons -- however artless and lovable those demons are -- Garbus is anxious to thrill, to please, to entertain, to make sense of a world outside herself.
As for the ancestry of this noise in the pop galaxy, never mind the moments that plainly display a Blondie or B-52's reference point on some superficial level, it certainly seems to me that this is what it must have felt like when London Calling, with its effortless integration and fussing up of ageless sounds, or Remain in Light, investigating the spiritual depth of polyrhythms from a hyperactively emotional standpoint, were released. Garbus is really that imaginative, that graceful, that pressing.
In fairness, she is a singer whose work is genuinely made grand by her voice. Without it, this would only be what's vague and dispassionate; slap on this, say, Zooey Deschanel's voice or even Inara George's and you'd get something perhaps interesting, far more risky than their usual work, but hardly life-saving. Garbus completes the portrait; tUnE-yArDs don't surrender to girl-group politics or obsess over their aesthetics. If it retains anything from those old records, it's none of their mustiness. That's thanks to the subservience to the songs (in the vein of Van Morrison or Tom Verlaine) and the remarkable fluidity and virtuosity of Garbus' singing. She can sound so entirely unlike herself from track to track -- like a more coy and intelligent Anthony Kiedis on opener "My Country," like an even more sinister PJ Harvey on "Wooly Wolly Gong," like a way-out seductress on "Powa" or a streetwise wanderer on "Gangsta," or like a crestfallen romantic on "Doorstep" -- that she has no such thing as a "real" voice, except to the extent they all reveal the same basic humanity. Even Mel Blanc ultimately sounded "like" Mel Blanc. This is different; the voice invariably reveals what's behind the songs, which are worrisome, hard-edged, at times sensual, and always inexhaustibly good-hearted.
And that last trait is what allows tUnE-yArDs to uncover a broad and infinitely assured emotional vocabulary. That a fired-up love song like "Powa," about needing to be held down "before my body flies away," can coexist peacefully with the doubt-fraught, warmly hilarious but sharply feminist semi-anthem "Killa" ("I'm a lemon, not a black-and-blue kinda woman") is as infinitely reassuring as, indeed, the celebratory cry against victimhood "Bizness" or the empathy and desperation Garbus expresses, note for note perfectly, on the masterful tragedy "Doorstep."
"Doorstep" is the song of the album, probably the song of 2011. With the storytelling verve of Talking Heads' "Listening Wind" but all of the audible pain the older song omits, Garbus sails into a wrenching tale of a man, boyfriend or husband, so immensely loved his arms inspired her "first joy in life," who is gunned down by ghosts from his past in the doorway. Amidst a repeating plead for understanding from the "p'liceman," Garbus gives a harrowing performance, recounting the details and the injustice and the hurt, the depth of hurt. Then about two minutes and forty seconds in, the heretofore stark instrumentation gives way into a lush prom-night backdrop while she cries her eyes out, and every human who listens will in turn rush to find a way to cope and she shakes her head and wonders simply why the violence, maybe the same violence she was head over heels for on "Riotriot," is permitted to contain her when she's "tried so hard to be a peaceful, loving woman." It's the fulfillment of the Joplinesque, soulful cry of joy on "Powa," and the most disarming, soft, heartrending moment of an astounding album.
Last year I made a proclamation, to whatever extent such silly templates and rules even shape this weblog, that the A+ rating you see at the top of this review would be withheld for any album until the end of the year. I stand by that, it seems logical enough. Chronologically, none of the last four albums I think deserve such a grade would've earned it from me immediately. But the fifth most recent one, Yo La Tengo's I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, would have. This is just as unquestionable an instant classic, an instant benchmark for me. Ten incredibly well-crafted, resonant songs that are felt and playful and direct and immense, all over way too soon. It would be dishonest not to plug it in the highest manner possible. Again I say, buy this now.