(Marriage [orig] / 4AD [reissue])
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
I don't have to tell you, if you read this blog or my other writings or if you freaking know me at all, that I am pretty well in awe of tUnE-yArDs, more so than I've been with an artist in a number of years. That would've already been the case had Amber and I not seen her live this past October, standing in the front row in the mass of dancing bodies, inches away from Merrill Garbus, but that certainly didn't hurt. Garbus has won many hearts in these last nine months since the release of her second album under the tUnE-yArDs rubric. How, then, does the proverbial fan of w h o k i l l approach her prior release, BiRd-BrAiNs, once the myriad tunnels and grooves in the subsequent record have all seemingly revealed themselves? The answer is -- with great, fresh joy, as was always intended, as if there is no later classic for it to bump up against.
The differences are major, though in final effect they really don't mean much. Clearly tUnE-yArDs began as far more identifiably a solo, non-band project, designed plainly as a cathartic outlet for Garbus' melodic and stylistic interests. These songs were recorded with the favored ukulele-and-sampler setup in Audacity; a veneer of rawness should ideally come from music more than medium, but here you get both. In quality of both performance and writing, Garbus is ever so slightly more frayed and fragile here. What this finally serves is to make the album feel more spontaneous, a less practiced gift that means passionately to connect, to give joy. It charms you more than it knocks you out -- most of the time, anyway.
Those aesthetics and attitudes aside, the two records are clearly of a piece. BiRd-BrAiNs gains traction from its messiness and slight sprawl, with the way it occasionally flies off into abrupt asides of music and archived sound, a cough here, a bit of joyous jamming there, a blueberry snack on "For You." When Garbus is concentrating and determined, though, she is already crafting some of the most pressing and undiluted American music of recent years. Your first thought on encountering the Mbuti chant opening "Hatari" is it doesn't make any claim to being pure but is nevertheless lived-in and guttural, not at all an empty affectation, and well, it isn't Paul Simon (or Vampire Weekend), is it? And there's nothing everyday, nothing at all, about anyone who can pop a Mahotella Queens bridge into a threateningly unstoppable banger (uke banger, at that!) like "News."
It isn't meant to be an insult to say that the sound of lo-fi is too small, too hazy and superficial, to be the definitive vessel for Garbus' work -- it's the same story for John Darnielle and, why not, the Beatles. What makes it appropriate here is her attitude toward it. Whereas on w h o k i l l she would be a fully empowered creature consumed by higher needs, back here she's willing to muse and dote on herself a bit more. What I'm trying to say, I think, is that to some extent these are love songs, quite literally because they themselves cry out to be loved and understood. Their full-bodied world-embrace is courageously romantic and sunny and desirous of some far-up-above fulfillment; that's more familiar than the sentiments populating something like "Doorstep" or "Gangsta," but it's also an act of sanity-assuring humanism. The sound on "Fiya" of racing toward the heavens and just being is in its fashion something as powerful as you can put in recorded music.
"Hatari" and "Fiya" alone are tastes of the unbridled Garbus, but her wicked humor and personable subservience to sound are most evident on the staggering "News." I'm not sure which of these three songs is the clear showpiece, but I know that "News" may be the song that explains everything wonderful and ingenious about tUnE-yArDs in a handily packaged three and a half minutes. It's sass, snarl, and hip hip, a loud and hard feminist triumph. A sampled beat that plops around with the wet-frog sound of "Instant Karma!" pumping along patiently while Garbus hammers her uke and lets her gentle, snakelike melody weave around. All the while she's giving vent to gloriously perverse sentiments about not needing any booze "to get it up in the morning" and most importantly, letting you know she won't take this shit anymore no matter what. The contradiction of her lilting phrases with the relentlessness in her words and music is the driving force of BiRd-BrAiNs, a necessary motif with its more relaxed vocal structure.
Contradictions, in general, light the fire under these songs, how "Hatari" can sound so open-aired and natural like something that sprang up from your body but is still constantly surprising, or how the yearning of "Sunlight" has the feel of something astonishingly controlled and assured. Slyly modest at first, the latter builds to an enormous climax until the wall of ukuleles sounds like it's going to snap your speakers in half. The grandest showcase of all, of course, for Garbus' impulses is her voice. The first dramatic reveal of its cathartic, alarming range is on "Lions," an intimate and mysterious but lovely circular piece that begins small, just an infectious beat, but then she cuts loose and begins to shout, howl, and grunt, all with unfailing confidence, in touch with vast abilities we can scarcely even imagine.
And if you didn't realize then the bottomless virtuosity of Garbus' singing, "Jamaican" will seal it -- this thing is a wonder: wicked-sinister cooing followed by abrasive, spitting smack talk that collides into a screaming rant, against the sound of a heavily sampled construction site. Not all the songs are so overloaded with ideas, but like every initially ordinary-seeming Beatles single, they all have some surreal touch: the weird synth and traffic sounds on "Jumping Jack," the killer riffage that drives and morphs "Little Tiger." Even her count-ins are awesome (see "Safety"), and the sense of gleeful pattern living in the construction of her songs gives a clue to the coming cacophony of w h o k i l l. That's handy, because as odd as it seems, Garbus seems so much more studied and calm here, and there's something wonderful and revealing about that... but experiencing her work backward, I tend to miss the aggression a little.
So much of BiRd-BrAiNs has such a touch of the deliberate, the careful distribution of Garbus' gifts, that it's like the lift of a cinematic curtain when she just throws it all out and goes crazy on "Fiya," a song that stands firmly apart from the entire remainder of her work -- filled with genuine yearning, vulnerability, it's powerful enough before you notice the deft wisdom in the words: "What if my own skin makes my skin crawl?" It's reassuring. We can't be Merrill Garbus. We could live a thousand years and work hard at whatever we do every day and never be that fucking smart and gifted... but we can still recognize in ourselves something she feels, and that's why we have and need art itself. This longer messier record is her first of two major gifts to us, with surely many more to come.
[SEE ALSO:]
w h o k i l l (2011)
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