Tim Darcy - Saturday Night

Pitchfork 70

Saturday night has long been pop music’s favorite part of the week—a time for fighting, fevers, and over-excited group spelling bees. But if the cover of his first solo album is any indication, Tim Darcy likes to spend it alone with his plants. His Saturday Night isn’t about going out on the town, but retreating inside his mind, following his wandering thoughts wherever they lead, even if they take him to some dark places. As frontman for Montreal quartet Ought, Darcy has, over the course of two records, emerged as one of indie rock’s most wily and witty wordsmiths, channeling the daily absurdities and anxieties of modern urban life into twitchy post-punk screeds. By contrast, Saturday Night is more intimate in every way: in scale, in production, and most importantly, in its emotional vocabulary.

On the one hand, Saturday Night does exactly what you expect a solo record from a member of a raucous rock band to do: It’s more off the cuff and rougher around the edges, and showcases a more introspective side than the day job normally allows. On the other hand, it’s an assault on that very idea. Over its 11 songs (including one hidden one), Darcy slowly dismantles the confessional crooner archetype until he’s just messing around with the raw materials, transforming himself from singer-songwriter to sound sculptor. And it becomes increasingly clear that, for Darcy, Saturday Night isn’t just a reservoir for songs that don’t quite fit his main band’s m.o., but a portal to a world beyond rock’n’roll entirely.

From the outset, Saturday Night both plays to expectations and subverts them. Opening rave-up “Tall Glass of Water” begins on familiar fidgety footing—though it’s a little more rickety than the typical Ought jam, the frenetic energy coursing through it makes the source easy enough to identify. But one minute in, Darcy brings the song’s smash ‘n’ grab momentum to a dead stop and reboots it as a cool mid-tempo strut—as if he was playing Lou Reed’s Transformer at 45 rpm and suddenly flipped it to 33. “Well the questions are being asked,” he sings, “Is it fate or is it popsicle?” The meaning may not be clear, but the message is: we’re on his melted clock now, and things are about to get surreal.

Saturday Night frontloads its most melodic moments, though even the sturdiest songs are outfitted with booby traps and escape hatches. “Joan Pt 1, 2” is a hit of woozy distorto-pop that free falls into an empty-cathedral chorale. “You Felt Comfort” wraps warm ‘n’ fuzzy guitar strums around frank lyricism (“You felt comfort and release/For a trauma that was making you weak”) in classic Neutral Milk Hotel fashion, before the rhythm suddenly drops out for the final verse as if the drummer was coin-operated. But the swooning “Still Waking Up” is Darcy’s shiniest diamond in the rough. It strikes a perfectly Morrissey-esque balance of aching melancholy and arch meta-humor: “Waking up alone was always a hard day’s night/’Cause my head is full of popular songs/Old ones I never sang along to/Isn’t it funny how that happens?”

But with the gleaming mid-album instrumental “First Final Days,” Darcy draws a line in the sand, closing the book on the album’s more sanguine first act while anticipating the anti-pop provocations that await on side two. The title track is unlikely to join the pantheon of Saturday-night party songs, its claustrophobic psychosis rendered with a dirgey drumbeat, ear-piercing guitar scrapes, and Darcy’s deadpan-to-panicked vocal. (“Let me out! And I’ll run!” he pleads, as if a prisoner to his own song.) “Found My Limit” is less jarring, but its hypnotic avant-folk oscillations and Darcy’s eerie, disembodied voice make it equally chilling. When Darcy gets back to more recognizable song forms on the psych-pop shanty “Saint Germain” and the drowsy piano-bar ballad “What’d You Release?,” they feel corrupted, as if infected by the preceding forays into free-form, found-sound disorder.

But if Saturday Night’s drifting second act carries the sense of Darcy feeling and fumbling his way through the dark, he eventually finds the calm in chaos. The penultimate instrumental “Beyond Me” is Saturday Night’s messiest song—all trembling, corroded strings and random piano plinks—but it’s also the album’s purest, most joyful expression, like the bleary-eyed moment of relief that hits you as the sun rises after a night of brutal insomnia. And with that, Darcy arrives at a place that’s the complete inverse of Ought, both musically and philosophically: Rather than concern himself with navigating the outside world, with Saturday Night, he’s produced a suitably unsettled soundtrack for just trying to keep your shit together on the inside.