2 keepers
keeper avg .166
My initial exposure to Tune-yards was as another one of those one-person-band with a looping pedal performance artists. Though the performance I saw was entertaining enough, I was glad to hear that the recorded work certainly goes beyond this cunning stunt. At best, Merrill Garbus and her bassist partner Nate Brenner provide serious hooks, surprising textures, and evoke various genres including various eras of soul.
Album opener "Find a New Way" goes right for the gold with a feel-good fanfare and an ambitious multi-part vocal bridge that gives "Bohemian Rhapsody" a run, only to falter when the verses come around. The retro-soul "Real Thing" likewise reach its stride about 3/4 of the way in with one of the album's best moments. The alternative radio hit "Water Fountain"**** starts as a repeating playground chant that ratchets up with added textures, finally exploding in an ecstatic rite. At times there is a tendency for melodies that are seemingly complex for the sake of being complex; the retro-futurist "Look Around" manages to turn this into an uber-angular feature rather than a bug, floating along on layers of pattering piano and buzzing blasts of synth. The pulsating, atmospheric "Time of Dark"**** is like a blast of 80's new wave with some more recent Kanye West updates.
The best feature of these first few tracks is their strong sense of flow and development throughout, of slowly building to an ecstatic conclusion, but starting with the madly thumping "Sink-O" this ambition is less apparent and the results are less consistent. The exception and best overall track in the second half is definitely "Left Behind," which sounds a lot like Beck; it also contains the album's title and culminates in the celebratory "holiday holiday let's go crazy" coda. But aside from the chorus of "Hey Life" and the great vocal break in "Wait for a Minute," most of the memorable moments are the strange curiosities, like the a capella "Rocking Chair", a chorus that sounds like a computer personality on the fritz ("Wait for a Minute"), and a surprisingly judgemental-sounding skit ("Why Do We Dine on the Tots?").
Comments