am i sick to think i look best under fluorescent light? mooned yoni wolf eons ago on the sanddollarsep. his first faltering steps away from anticon hiphoppery towards anticon skewed poppery. a line that struck me for superficial reasons coz i’ve always thought my shadow looks way better than my actual person, all sharp angles and smooth lines not the lumpy sack of odd porridgey flesh i actually am.
yeah those faltering steps have become gazelle-esque leaps and bounds over recent years from elephant eyelashthrough alopecia to this bugger. you’d struggle (beyond wolf’s nasally intonations) to link oaklandazulasylumto eskimo snow. you might manage to draw a line betwixt the two but it’d be a mad squiggly one in different colours of crayon that run off the paper onto yr mums good tablecloth.
while recorded at the same time as alopecia(and borrowing a chorus) this is a totally different beast. rhymes replaced with warped crooning, psyched-out country instead of bedroomed studio loops. catchier, more straightfoward, increasingly cohesive (all positives y’hear) but losing none of the intricate wordsmitherry. as linguistically tricky as ever, covering his usual subject of flesh, in all it’s coital and mortal coil-tal forms, and near creepy intimate obsessions with age and death. there’s something of the pop pop art about the record, like some odd elseworld where samuel beckett grew up jewish, digging buck 65, de la soul and danielson. where nothing is funnier than unhappiness is a sardonic obervation rather than absurdist despair. where childhood memories of dead foxes, matchbox cars combine with masturbatory neuroses and the frankly genius line ‘sex can make you younger and older at the same time’.
so essentially here you have full on technicolour big band glowering pop. like what the flaming lips (it’s out soon!) specialise in these days. whereby mangling and caressing yr standard voice keys strings and skins into off-kilter nuggets of shiny musical schlurm. which is to say a lovely warm blend of folky geetar fingerpicking, country slide and fifties reverb over a sunnydelic melliflous wall of spectorish keys wonderfully at odds with the gloomy surreal sobriety of the lyrics. it’s everything that i fucking love about (pop) music, about tunes, about words and weirdly in a year full of awesome noise this is probably the best thing i’ve heard this year. yup.
