Mutual Benefit - Skip a Sinking Stone
Tiny Mix Tapes 70
Mutual Benefit
Skip a Sinking Stone
[Mom + Pop; 2016]
Rating: 3.5/5
The one time I met Jordan Lee, I didn’t know what to expect. The band came through my small college town en route to Durham, NC with Noah Kline’s ambient project Cuddle Formation and stopped to play our rickety art space on a cool Wednesday in November. The three moved with a wide-eyed warmth and funny, charming sincerity as we talked immaterial theory, astrology, and the embarrassing world of amateur electronic sports. Despite most theory sitting pretty firmly on traditions of sharp cynicism and stiff social critique, the group brought a charming optimism that — even with probably a rich awareness of the sort of social injustice, income inequality, and political oppression that’ve left generations disillusioned — found joy in a sprawling, turbulent, precarious universe. Later that night, Lee hummed over hymns and jingles at our organ, rising up with a jokey candor and wide-eyed enthusiasm before accompanying the others in their sets. Alone yet together, sprawling out in the barren intimacy of a small room of friends, the night felt full and bold and powerful, a testament to the latent power of communal art in all its soft, sample-based splendor.
Skip a Sinking Stone, Lee’s followup to 2013’s Love’s Crushing Diamond, wears a lot of these thoughts on its soft, scraggly skin. The album’s backbone lies in metaphor; a skipping stone, sailing far across the soapy surface becomes a symbol for life and loss, a symbiotic acceptance of a larger fleeting impermanence. Less based around the seedy synths and banjo jangle of I Saw the Sea and The Cowboy’s Prayer, single “Not for Nothing” felt like the rolling pastoral force of the English countryside in reverence. Equal parts bucolic ballad and secular hymn, “Not for Nothing” was one of the wordiest moment for the project yet, built around sinewy, circular lines that end with a soft gulp, a quick breath, and the gentle affirmation: “It’s not for nothing.”
“Skipping Stones” ripples with piano chords, bubbling over in hushed cymbals and jangly rubatos, while “Lost Dreamers” weaves Kline’s requisite flute lines into a fanned deck of stings, plucked from the orchestra and assembled into new, unconventional ensembles built around stereo spread. “Nocturne” embraces field recordings and loose electroacoustics that wouldn’t sound out of place on Alessandroni’s concrète gem Biologie Marina, while “Fire Escape” wrings pitched loops and string harmonics through soft zither samples and into massive orchestral resound on “The Hereafter.”
Mutual Benefit has always found beauty in texture and ambience, and Skip a Sinking Stone is no exception. The album’s interludes and shorter tracks prove that Lee has an incredible vision for his sound beyond a lot of the perils that plague inoffensive folk today, but the release is not without fault. Caught in stale syllabic rhymes and melodic math that reach out toward accessibility, “Not for Nothing” falls flat, which is frustrating when so much of past releases have used these modes of wise naturalism to build wild, larger-than-life intrigue. Although this certainly marks a misstep, it leaves me with a larger understanding of the project’s limitations and a firmer awareness of how incredibly thin the songwriting space between wisdom, ambivalence and didacticism really is.
From every fractured fragment in field recording to each muted acoustic thrum beneath, it’s clear that Mutual Benefit has mastered its own forms of beauty and sonority in a spectrum all its own. But whether or not this adds up to anything larger than sonic indulgence is a tougher question, one that probably says more about listeners and their personal tastes than anything contained within the release. Like the flatness of a reflective pool, Skip a Sinking Stone stretches out in stunning beauty, giving listeners a gorgeous reflection of soaring, spectral synesthesia. But beyond a skip along the surface, the release is hesitant to move toward anything of a prescriptive statement; though, with lightness and transience so central to its theme, maybe that’s by design.
01. Madrugada
02. Skipping Stones
03. Closer, Still
04. Lost Dreamers
05. Getting Gone
06. Not for Nothing
07. Nocturne
08. Slow March
09. Many Returns
10. City Sirens
11. Fire Escape
12. The Hereafter
Pitchfork 70
Jordan Lee had quietly released six albums prior to 2013, so Mutual Benefit didn’t exactly come out of nowhere three years ago. But Love’s Crushing Diamond sounded like it did: a document of emotional and physical displacement during Lee’s “year of notable absences,” its florid, orchestral folk was an anachronism compared to the slick, extroverted, and heavily-hyped pop that defined that year's indie breakthroughs. Much about Mutual Benefit remains in 2016: Lee’s still a wandering spirit surrounding himself with an orchestra of friends, recording in “forests, attics and hotel rooms” and it still sounds completely out of step with prevailing trends. But Skip a Sinking Stone is the first Mutual Benefit album to come from a very identifiable somewhere; the first half follows a newly successful band through carefully plotted tours and the second takes place in Lee’s adopted home of New York City.
In addition to Lee’s itinerary, the autumnal color scheme and loping cowboy strum of first single “Not For Nothing” evoked Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning: another clutch of traveling songs from a collectivist, indie-folk vagabond who settled into NYC. And like that record, Skip a Sinking Stone doesn’t sound or even feel like New York City. Nonetheless, the mere invocation of the city provides a kind of metaphysical importance and universality to Lee’s concerns, that he’s not just another dude in his late 20s trying to come to grips with personal success, lessons in love, and the sense that America is slowly, irreversibly headed towards self-destruction because people like him are never in charge and never want to be.
The similarities end there: Lee’s never been given nor has he sought out “voice of a generation” plaudits. Skip a Sinking Stone is invariably gentle, speaking for Lee and maybe those around him. Lee surrounds himself with people as equally curious, lovestruck, and positive as himself. As a result, Skip a Sinking Stone is probably the most chipper album about gig life ever recorded.
“Let’s take the long way home, let’s throw away our phones,” Lee sings moony-eyed during the very literal “Lost Dreamers,” a song which establishes Mutual Benefit as a natural convergence point between Neil Young’s Harvest and early 2000s freak-folk; this is the prevailing theme of Skip a Sinking Stone’s first half, where touring is just a mind-expanding road trip that happens to be interrupted by occasional load-ins, blog interviews, and stints at the merch table. “And if we get lost in a dream, wasn’t it worth all we’ve seen?,” he asks. It can all seem at odds with reality, but Skip a Sinking Stone is just at odds with the harried, hassled perspective that voluntarily serves as reality for most; Mutual Benefit never tries to force its viewpoint or really much of anything on the listener.
Besides, Lee’s POV is wholly embedded in Mutual Benefit’s music, so if you want to take his sentiments to task for being a little cloying, you might as well criticize the string parts for being too pretty. But even if this is a gorgeous album, fantastically so, that quality is occasionally to its detriment. “I’m so afraid to fall in love again, I know how it ends,” Lee sings on “Skipping Stones,” and that’s about as dark as things can get here. When “City Sirens” alludes to police brutality and Eric Garner’s death, the problem isn’t that the tonal shift is too jarring; it’s that there’s barely any at all. Though heartfelt and honest as everything else, a very specifically rendered line like “killers exposed through broken windows/there’s oaths they swore but what’s it all for?” hits with the same impact as “If there’s one thing I know, it’s that all the good times go, and the hard times too.”
After Love’s Crushing Diamond, Lee admitted he was wary of attaching any kind of story to his music, let alone his radical politics. And it seems like even stories as commonplace as “the road” and “New York” can moderate the ineffable magic of his previous work. Likewise, the mindset of Skip a Sinking Stone is best entered with the intent of total immersion and allotting a similar amount of Mutual Benefit music to more conventional song structures and interludes can feel like a vision quest stopped too frequently for bathroom breaks. But the enduring sadness in Love’s Crushing Diamond was drawn from Lee witnessing the destructive force of escapism in others. So if the newfound pragmatism and stability of Skip a Sinking Stone seems inevitable for Lee after Mutual Benefit’s success, an inveterate dreamer can’t help but make it sound transitional.
Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016