Majical Cloudz - Are You Alone?

Pitchfork 80

Halfway through Majical Cloudz's set at the 2014 Pitchfork Music Festival, the music cut out, leaving singer Devon Welsh alone with a live microphone in front of 6,000 people. The scene put a new spin on an old bad dream: Not only had Welsh shown up to class without clothes on, but the classroom had become a baseball field and everyone on it was a little bit drunk.

After a couple of dumb jokes (the packing peanuts of any good showman), Welsh canvassed the audience for requests and ended up singing an a capella version of an already startlingly intimate song called "Bugs Don't Buzz" from the band's 2013 album Impersonator ("If life could be forever one instant/ Would it be the moment you met me? No, my love").

For some bands, the moment might've constituted disaster, but for Majical Cloudz it was a logical endpoint to their music, which functions as a kind of emotional strip show: Welsh knows it's a performance but he still ends up naked. When the song was over, the crowd clapped with embarrassed hesitation: Should we be watching this? And should Welsh be doing it?

The band's new album, Are You Alone?, picks up where Impersonator left off: Stark, ethereal instrumentals buoyed by Welsh's unflinching voice. Musically, their roots are in English romantics like Depeche Mode, themselves a moody electronic gloss on the lieder that composers like Franz Schubert were writing 150 years earlier. Philosophically, they chart a junction of new age and hardcore punk, both of which prize a radical scraping away of excess in their search for truth. Majical Cloudz want empathy and they want it now.

I call them a "band" but should note how they stretch the definition of the word. As a singer, Welsh performs with the confidence and intimacy of someone holding a hairbrush in front of their bedroom mirror—the music is mostly in his head. His counterpart, Matthew Otto, is less visible but equally important. A former student in an electroacoustic studies program that emphasized sound design as much as composition, Otto doesn't try and approximate backing musicians so much as create vapor trails where backing musicians might've stood. If the name Majical Cloudz has any bearing on their sound, it's because of him: He's the air Welsh breathes.

Alone is less stripped-down than Impersonator, but it feels less confrontational, too. The band recently went on tour opening for Lorde, and seem to have figured out how to broaden their sound while softening it at the same time, all without losing the detonating high that made Impersonator so remarkable. Songs like "So Blue" and "Downtown"—both standouts—are easy to imagine as more fully fleshed out pieces of music, conveying size without occupying space. Like photographic negatives, you can still see the image but the inversion of blacks and whites lends it a kind of alien melancholy.

Like Impersonator, Alone is a sad album, but its sadness is a kind of tall tale, the details of which are overblown for dramatic effect. At times its lyrics sound less like expressions of personal darkness than advertisements for darkness in general, written in lettering so big you could read it from the highway. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, he professed his admiration for Andy Kaufman, an artist usually classified as a comedian but whose work tends to function more like social performance art. The connection makes sense: Like Kaufman, Welsh tends to scramble performance and sincerity, laying himself bare in a way that seems more honest when he's onstage than it might in so-called real life. At peak he becomes a kind of Puberty Incarnate, bearer of feelings so awkward and yet so incandescent that they seem like a joke and a dare at the same time.

A few weeks ago, I blew off part of an afternoon to see the Pixar movie Inside Out, which follows the inner life of a young girl named Riley as personified by five fundamental emotions: joy, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. The emotions—characters unto themselves—run around Riley's head jockeying for control, turning each new experience into a color-coded orb later filed away in Riley's labyrinthine memory.

Early on, Sadness—a dumpy, self-effacing Midwestern woman—is portrayed as a kind of negative-force King Midas, unwittingly ruining Riley's memories by turning them a cool, melancholy blue. The movie's revelation is when Joy—cannily represented as part-Tinkerbell, part passive-aggressive control freak—starts to realize that Sadness isn't a threat to Riley but a necessary catalyst for her growth, not a barrier to Joy but a bridge. Toward the end, a new feeling pops out of Riley's psychological conveyor belt: The yellow of Joy and the blue of Sadness, swirled together like ribbons inside a marble.

The moral is simple, but in a culture obsessed by happiness, it seems surprising, too: Maybe sadness isn't just an O.K. feeling to have, but an essential part of our emotional balance. Without it, we live in monochrome.

I kept thinking of Majical Cloudz, whose music—like Inside Out—seems to recast sadness as a feeling that doesn't damage the self but helps keep it whole. Now, when I see that album title (Are You Alone?), it seems less like a grim rhetorical question than an invitation—the kind of thing you might ask someone who is alone but looks like they could use a little company.