Alt-J - Relaxer
The Guardian 60
(Infectious Music)
The mainstream has embraced Alt-J: their short career has witnessed them headline Madison Square Garden, win major awards and accrue over a billion streams. Their two albums have sold in excess of 2m copies. And yet here we are in 2017, listening to Pleader, featuring the London Metropolitan Orchestra, Ely Cathedral boy choristers, police siren samples and voices calling “Victoria! Victoria! This is our queen!” Relaxer’s oddness is compounded by the album’s artwork, which references the Playstation One video game LSD: Dream Emulator.
There is much for an addled brain to explore here: spooky shadows, flourishes of beauty that dissolve into horror, bizarre historical references, splurging sexuality. Deadcrush is Nine Inch Nails on helium, and Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell creeps in on the labyrinthine 3WW. It’s a short yet extravagant blow-out, a Heston Blumenthal banquet of an album, so consumed with its own belligerently perplexing path, it may exclude peripheral fans.
Continue reading... Thu Jun 01 21:45:06 GMT 2017The Guardian 60
(Infectious)
Having made two albums of award-winning but fidgety digital folk-rock, Alt-J were ripe for evolution. The trio haven’t exactly poured a vat of chemical hair relaxer into their laptops, but on this third outing they have taken a detangling wet brush to their try-hard songcraft, leaving space for these eight oblique tracks – about death, sexual trysts, literary references, Tasmania and “loving” in one’s “own language” – to breathe more cinematically. The folk quotient remains noticeable: 3WW begins as a ballad might. Soon after, the band are reinterpreting House of the Rising Sun; there’s even an easy-going, campfire feel to the electronics. Fans may balk at the curveballs – Hit Me Like That Snare is a louche garage-rock foray – but they telegraph the self-assurance that doesn’t rely on overcomplication.
Continue reading... Sun Jun 04 07:00:17 GMT 2017Drowned In Sound 50
OK. So there is a house in New Orleans, right? Place of sin and misery and the ruin of many poor girls and boys, right? Whether or not this house actually exists or not is moot, for the symbolic nadir that imprisons the working classes – the drunkard’s tab, the gambler’s impulse, the prostitute’s contract - never goes away. Thus, from the backwoods of Kentucky to the streets of London, from Lead Belly to Nina Simone to Dolly Parton, “House of the Rising Sun” persists – and most times, could still scare you stiff into sobriety. Even Parton’s country-come-to-town crossover hit stressed the caution in the tale: get an honest job, or else stagnate in debt.
Oh, but where are my priorities? We’re talking, after all, about alt-J – the keystroke that yields ∆, the genre-waffling dudes that won a Mercury prize with their debut album and sampled Miley Cyrus for their second, and a favorite pincushion for heat-seeking music writers. Why should we tangle this new album, Relaxer, with class dynamics and the 'House of the Rising Sun'?
Well. To be blunt, I’m on the fence about this one. That’s because, as on An Awesome Wave, alt-J present two faces to us: the somber, Nick Drake-leaning acoustic balladeer, versus velvet-crushed crowd-pleasers with the wild-eyed soul of Cold War Kids and the thumping heart of the Black Keys. Which, if you described lead single 'In Cold Blood' to me in that fashion, I’d be like 'yeah, nah'. But hot damn, what a towering fanfare of a single, as shamelessly stadium-sized as Imagine Dragons or Adele, yet replete with such enigmas as the recurring binary code sequence and the kooky synth lines.
Likewise for 'Deadcrush', hands down the sexiest slab of a bass line alt-J have ever devised, but with lines like “I don’t believe in a maid of honour (now would be the first time I’d believe that frontman Joe Newman had a massive Spice Girls crush in his youth – Baby Spice, to be exact). And then there’s the deranged garage rock banger 'Hit Me Like That Snare', an unhinged (read: horny) stab at Clinic-esque oscillation that certainly spanks you silly with its kinky implications, but still rolls in like the life of the party (even if you wanna strangle him sometimes for talking above everyone else).
Now, the crux is: that’s the half of Relaxer that I can live with, the half that strives actively to dispel alt-J’s pretentious front and swing for the top of the charts. But then, my friends, we return to the 'House of the Rising Sun' – because here, on this wikkle precious cover version with the cyclical Leonard Cohen guitar, we’re reminded of every reason to hate the three blokes. To my knowledge, it’s the only version that deflects the story away from the storyteller (“oh Lord, my father was one”), and slams the brakes on the harrowing cycle of sin; three valuable spaces for lyrics are usurped by the redundant refrain “it’s a happy, happy, happy fun day”. In alt-J’s hands, the working man’s morality tale melts into a glossy, sepia-tinted postcard that undercuts the original narrative of struggle and despair.
See, once you’re stung by that, you start to mistrust every other 'folky' endeavour on Relaxer. Fuck 'Adeline', we don’t need another ballad addressed to a girl that a dude fancies; and fuck 'Last Year', or at least the (literal) funeral dirge in the first half that agonises over the mundane; and especially fuck that other single, '3WW', which tries to make colonialism romantic (“I just want to love you in my own language”). For all their clever allusions and grandiose ensembles, alt-J really ARE just your average, self-serving pop stars, that project art as a limelight upon themselves rather than hold it like a mirror up to the world they’ve experienced. Even their retooled website – a simulation of a simulator of a dream, in which you can walk around and find images of the band and their gear – reinforces this approach, of reducing art to ornament.
“I don’t subscribe to your cultural norms, taunts Newman on 'Hit Me Like That Snare'. But the very phrase shelves alt-J neatly among their fellow millennials as devotees of the individual age, concerned more about their aesthetic and wit than any true means of expression. So, yes, there is a house in New Orleans – they just tore it down, renamed it SunRïs, and now offer white chocolate macchiatos in recycled cups with a tiny synopsis of the building’s history on the sleeve.
Wed May 31 09:59:38 GMT 2017Pitchfork 45
Bad music, after all, earns its distinction. You have to seize someone by the lapels, dominate their senses, to give them the chance to despise you. It requires, if not bravery, then at least audacity, and alt-J have never been audacious. The biggest offense one could take is the way Joe Newman sings through his nose, like a mean-spirited hobbit mocking the singing voice of another hobbit. But it is instantly easy to hear how 2012’s An Awesome Wave managed its bloodless coup, one distracted pair of earbuds at a time—most of the album is a comforting jumble of clicks, coos, and hums. The music had no center, but its edges were soothing, and if you had a few hours to kill at a laundromat, it synced pleasingly with your silently tumbling socks.
Their beige and mostly tuneless second album maintained this modest course through the choppy seas of festival bookings and departing band members, but on RELAXER, alt-J have, just maybe, grown a little used to success. They feel, perhaps, ready to stretch, to dip their toes into new styles and ready to take a few, you know, risks.
And this must be how we find ourselves confronting “Hit Me Like That Snare,” the fourth song on RELAXER and the first proudly, magnetically awful thing they’ve ever done. Committed alt-J fans are probably already used to Joe Newman’s unique touch with sexual imagery—for such an unassuming group, they sing often, and zealously, about fucking, or at least what fucking might be like, as interpreted by a befuddled AI. But because all words turned to consonant-free mush in his mouth, millions of festival-goers were likely and mercifully unaware they were dancing to a chorus of, “In your snatch fits pleasure/Broom-shaped pleasure” (”Fitzpleasure”). He may as well have been warbling roast chicken recipes.
On “Hit Me Like That Snare,” Newman appears to be trying to earnestly to swagger. Each word is ruthlessly audible as he sets the most ludicrous sex scene in rock history:
I’m at the door at a quarter to four
Poppers popping baby might take some more
I’m fucking loose, you’re gorgeous, I don’t care
Come closer, baby, slap me like that snare
‘Moon Shaped Pool’ plays in the velvet cell
Green neon sign reading ‘Welcome to hell’
Leather slings fall like oxygen masks
We’re going down, fuck my life in half.
The idea of an album full of this sort of blazing wreckage is perversely exciting, in the same way that a screaming, relationship-ending fight technically enlivens a bad party. But alas, RELAXER doesn’t have the lunatic conviction to embrace oblivion. The rest settles safely back into the mild, featureless middle distance, a realm of tastefully trimmed string arrangements, chamber woodwinds, and terminal boredom. They’ve cut back the anxious fidgets, clicks, and buzzes that textured their music and relinquish any claim to idiosyncrasy they might have had.
“Last Year” is a sedate meditation on death and grief featuring a placid vocal turn from English singer-songwriter Marika Hackman and an immaculately recorded oboe solo, which the song pauses for respectfully like a row of baby ducks crossing its path. “House of the Rising Sun” dials back the heat of the folk standard to the temperature of rapidly cooling tea. “3WW” begins the album with a soft-lit minute of finger-picked guitar before introducing a sound in the background that sounds suspiciously like someone snoring.
The truth is that alt-J have never had an identity, really, apart from Newman’s mangled lyrics and the fidgety, distracted arrangements of their songs. RELAXER shows us what remains after those quirks are dialed back: some perfectly nice, perfectly blank lads who have no idea why they are standing in front of you and even less of an idea what to say.
Tue Jun 06 05:00:00 GMT 2017