2020 Highlights: Fiona Apple, Destroyer, NNAMDÏ
As we stand in the second half of the year, we take some time to look back on some of the best projects of the year. For this edition, we look at the world around us, and ourselves while we're at it.
Destroyer - Have We Met
Dan Bejar, one of the most unbearable geniuses of the moment, presents his own music as a mystery to be solved. Moving from glam rock influences to MIDI electronics to his latest fascination, the refined sophisti-pop and jasmine music of the 80s, Destroyer uses those influences as backdrops, drawing on the familiarities of tones and instrumentation, to generate inexhaustible mazes of obtuse, twisted lyricism, with phrases and references being turned warning, forming a barricade of words that seem to want to build… something. That something is left to the interpretation of each listener, but if Destroyer has wanted to try to convey a feeling throughout his history, it is the will (and perhaps even the duty) of an artist to try and fail to capture everything he can feel and remember, letting the meaning of their words partially disappear wanting to touch how sublime and imposing the world is, whatever it is they are trying to convey. Destroyer always wanted to break that barrier, knowing that he will never really be able to, that there will always be a disconnect between what he is trying to say and how this is received by the rest of society, and lately his main composer and musician Dan Bejar has focused on the pain and artistic weight that these barriers give to artists, especially in a world in which apparently no one wants to hear what they have to say. It is music that becomes muffled and frustrated when it meets the indifference of the world.
Have We Met uses a recurring resource for Destroyer, the 80s.based ambience that, although it does not look for the melodies and happy and explosive arrangements of the time, seeks its more temperate and current tones; familiar enough to engage the listener, but based on unnerving grooves, too ambiguous and flat for said listener to get too comfortable. Between pianos clearly being played by keyboards, 808 drums, and guitars out of lost Bruce Springsteen demos (but without that view of the horizon), the atmosphere is reminiscent of the lounge arrangements of a band like Sade, but set in an environment that is too cold, too static, as if the music had a center that was once full of life, but is now empty, and only the edges can be felt. This is remote and unaffected music, even in its most vibrant moments. And Dan Bejar, the guide to this desert of passions, conceives a peculiar vocal performance, which can invoke the driest moments of Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys. It gives his voice a bit of wonder when he realizes what he sees, some surprise, but he can't help but leave something behind, filling those little flickers of light with melancholy and bitterness.
That bitterness is what drives the rest of the album to its natural conclusions. Bejar here cannot help but capture a daily terror in which no one can completely get out. As he describes in the majestic opening that is "Crimson Tide", it is one in which passions are put aside (but not entirely, since no one can get rid of them) for checks and moments of glory, no matter at what cost; in which everything important is shortened and everything is in decline, but nobody manages to notice it ("You open your mouth to watch your teeth shudder/At the mirror, at the clutter"), in which everything of value is lost and finding it again is an endless task. He describes the promise of sex in "Kinda Dark" as cold and unimportant, in which everything is viewed with piercing indifference, cutting off desire. Human errors and the need to say something through art are rendered redundant and lost in songs like "The Television Music Supervisor", in which all kinds of art are perceived as the same, without nuances that matter or that encourage someone to make some kind of change; rebels screaming into the void. "Just look at the world around you/Actually , no, don't look."
And this is the point where I should say something like "And yet, not everything is as dark as it sounds", to cut off the idea that this album is pure pessimism. And while that's true - Have We Met strikes a typical Destroyer balance between his raw worldview and a literary sense of humor, laughing at all he's missing and can't capture in words - this album anyway doesn’t stray from how ugly and frustrating its very existence is. It puts aside (though not with disdain) the superficial and fleeting activities like creating art in order to get through life's trauma in “Cue Synthesizer” and even “Crimson Tide” (“A child coos sweet nothings to a box of fuzz/He's not a child, he's 25, he’s never felt so alive”), and he never stops remembering why we endure what we have to endure. Perhaps the game is already fixed, giving to the powerful and leaving others with nothing ("You climb the walls, you're made of string"), dissuading anyone from even wanting to play in the first place; but as he says on "University Hill," a fortress of solitude's no contest when you're staring at oblivion. The urge to be able to find some kind of connection is not completely gone, but it is broken by the indifference of everything, and by how fleeting and insignificant those connections with others, for the most part, are. Destroyer fixates on the little euphorias and the effect (or mostly no effect) they have on everything, to the point that not even the music can stray too far. A world is painted in which we let what we love destroy and imprison us.
It will not be the most optimistic album for these times, although it is certainly not the darkest. It's not even the most obtuse listen on Destroyer's discography, as the sounds are inviting enough that a common listener can at least set this as background music. But that empty tranquility is what Have We Met sets to criticize, with enough force in lyricism to make the rest of the world assume some responsibility for the disaster they have committed, but with enough self-awareness to realize their own contribution in said disaster. "I find the silence unbearable/What does say about the silence?", Bejar recites in "It Just Doesn't Happen", and that attitude of trying to find something to hold on to is the ephemeral and suffocated spirit in which the dim moments of light found here reside. If Destroyer's music is a labyrinth, he doesn't mind getting lost in it here, perhaps because he doesn't fully trust what he can find when he reaches the exit-although the intrigue about what's outside persists.
NNAMDÏ - Brat
Some introductions are probably in order. Here’s NNAMDÏ, a man who seems like a Bandcamp newcomer who knows more than he lets on, someone who should burst and become one of indie’s favorites if anything for his sheer ambition and musical scope. A multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer, and singer who’s trying to combine modern mainstream rap and R&B’s melodic cadence with the technical ebb-and-flow of something resembling math rock. Once you take in that kind of genre combination and especially once you take a look at that bizarre cover art of a grown man pouting and acting like a little child, your head might drift towards “Oh, OK. Gimmick!”; more style than actual content, a mere novelty, a quick curiosity in the middle of a year filled with serious music to pay attention to. Then you go, and decide to play this album, and if you play it right… you probably won’t know what you just ran into.
Make no mistake, this album is incredibly deceptive, the kind that you seem to be getting a hold on and suddenly lose track of, all in a mere 40 minutes. It’s very easy to dismiss what a light listen this can be-nothing within the sound is ever too abrasive or overwhelming, or even all that busy once you scrape past the surface-but that’s the point, all the sounds are upfront and ready for you to see and digest them. But within that false place of comfort is where the discomfort and pressure come from. It’s like having a chat with a friend you’re just starting to know, and not really paying attention until they say something that shakes you to your core. The instrumentals are tinkering, constantly based on easy surfaces, waiting for you to reach into your own darkness, like a little child poking a bear and then running away. Every song establishes a groove early on and then proceeds to force it, drive it to become something it’s not, seeing and testing how much it can handle. The music constantly wants to settle and simmer down, play its jazzed drums, its wonky synths, and its smooth bass work, but it just keeps getting interrupted!
Constantly getting interrupted by NNAMDÏ, a man whose spirit is probably closest to Robert Smith’s, in the sense that they’re both very diffuse and melancholic children wandering around the woods, hiding from their parents. His range and sense of how and when to use it is stunning, the kind of performance where you never really know what he’s gonna do next. He can be the introspective type, a reflective man who’s still willing to face his problems head-on in the opener “Flowers to My Demons”, and immediately channel his inner baby throwing a tantrum that could rip open galaxies in the follow-up “Gimme Gimme”, the kind of stubborn and spiteful attitude that will repeat itself throughout the album. Simply put, the man’s a magician, and one who’s tired of being cast aside-he’ll make everything look alright until it’s not.
If anything, that’s what most of Brat is all about. Throughout the album, there’s a steady mantra that repeats itself, “I need you, need something new”, a phrase that could or couldn’t be a contradiction-and frankly, the “something new” he’s looking for changes at every chance it’s uttered. It could be the family he doesn’t call, how he wonders if they’ll answer back or think about him still, no matter how jaded he may or may not be. It could be his indecisiveness, his lack of agency that when it bursts, it only leaves people hurt or jaded, as he drifts further away from them. It could be his fear of failure, the kind that haunts him at every step as he can’t reconcile with the path that he’s chosen in life-this is who he is, and he can’t fully accept that. It could be his relationships with his peers, distant, full of resentment and unhealthy decisions, where he destroys himself. It could be God-it could always be God, no matter how “silent and above he remains”. But most of all, it could be his lack of self-control, the kind where he wants to go and eat the world and needs to realize he can’t, and that realization weighs on him permanently. He’ll never be the astronaut who can feed his family, he’s always gonna have to get by-no matter how much he feels he deserves it.
The good thing is he’s able to travel through his emotions and capture them into art that lives and breathes in its own little universe. Songs like “Gimme Gimme” and “Bullseye” revel in wanting you to pay attention to them at all times, with a childlike demeanor in NNAMDÏ’s voice like he was a cartoon character, and its rap beat cushioned by poison-filled cotton candy. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a song that sounds like, for example, “Price Went Up”, that takes the spite of former track “Gimme Gimme”, turns his keyboard work into his voice, lets itself get anchored by a deceptively simple guitar line that’s the sheer sound of terror, releases its little goons into a melodic battle, climbs into a harmonically ominous crescendo and simmers back down into the abyss that’s never out of sight, in only 2 minutes.
And there’s a 4-song row right in the middle of the album that might just be the best streak of music of the year. It begins with NNAMDÏ showing himself at his most open (but never losing his unique sense of humor) as he taps into a beautiful R&B-laced hook, and production that’s like looking at a faraway galaxy. And said faraway galaxy is found hurt and wounded in “Glass Casket”, as voices cry out against an impossible night; stars falling apart as NNAMDÏ won’t allow himself to, at least not yet. “I wanna be a traveler/I wanna witness everything/And then bring you to my bedside/I dream about it even when I wake up” is one of the best and one of the best-sung set of lyrics this year, the kind that yearns and hurts the more it looks ahead. “Perfect In My Mind” is where things get rocky, where that illusion is truly put to test as everything crashes down in the face of our hero; he said they just saw failure, now that failure is here, and a very tidy wave of chaos ensues, as if not to truly disrupt everything just yet. That will happen in the pinnacle of this album, “Semantics”, a smoky, subdued tune that, the more it thinks things through, the more the pieces don’t add up, the more it realizes what it lost to get there, the more it can’t stand to keep its head down, the more it second-guesses itself, the more anger it builds, the more jaded it becomes-”I changed into someone I can’t fix, changed into someone I can’t fix, yeah”. Breaking point. The hurricane unleashes in its virgin soil, the scream stops shutting itself off, the brat is fully realized.
In the end, this is the story of a man who can’t stand being the loser. A stubborn, reckless man who can’t refuse to let sleeping dogs lie, and will wake the whole neighborhood if necessary. He longs for what he feels he can’t have-he says “Give me everything that I deserve” on “Gimme Gimme”, yet there’s a part of him who feels he hasn’t earned it, and probably never will. He has the capacity to alienate everyone shall he feel the need, and whatever he’s given is not enough. We’ve all got a lot to learn. He may occasionally sound like an unreasonably talented alien, but he’s as human as can be, and few albums this year have tapped into that feeling of backhanded yearning so well. We can only hope this ain’t enough.
Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters
What a forceful thing. What a compliment to music this project is. Fetch the Bolt Cutters by Fiona Apple is not a particularly revolutionary or inventive record, but that is not the point of either this music or music in general. What it is though, is an avalanche of sounds so vivid, colorful, and even necessary, that talking about it in such an academic and clean way would be almost an insult. Fetch the Bolt Cutters is the dirty, it is the dirt, it is the stark cry of a woman who not once in her life was silent. Her jazzy pop hybrid that gradually took more from jazz than pop has served to influence dozens of artists in the last 20 years - from Regina Skeptor to Adele. And her dedication to being able to talk about both physical and psychological abuse in such open and poetic ways gives her music a political air that she may not have sought, but she never loses sight of when writing songs. And in this latest album, her first in 8 years, she looks for how to position herself in the midst of the overwhelming feminist moose of recent years, from Ni Una Menos to #MeToo, where she examines herself and her relationships more than ever. And the deeper you go, the more chaotic the music will be.
And we have to be clear, this is a very organized and planned chaos - at least, until it is not. Starting from an open and spacious mix, Fiona and her band do their best to make use of that space, not only drawing attention to the elements they add, but also to the silences between each instrument. Pianos with rotating melodic lines that revolve around heavy, thick percussion, with crashes that interrupt melodies and snares that cannot fight against a present bass, whose presence is limited by the sharp lines of the piano that gain firmness with the constant changes of arrangements of the drums that in turn are supported by basses that stand out for their erratic absences that give the piano moments of lightness that are obstructed by the percussion that-and thus, all the time, the songs rotate, for 50 minutes. This is one of the most playful albums of the year. And the great thing about the compositions is that, as hectic as the sound is, there are enough melodies and mantras to keep the listener from getting lost - this is not a difficult listen. It just takes a little time and patience.
And that rotational process happens when there's a groove that the whole band sticks to, because if not, hell comes out of this frenzy. A song like “Under the Table” is based on cute little melodies until the instruments create out of nowhere a black hole in the table that seems to have no end - or take the addition of a melotron in “Rack of His” that makes the song turn into a soundtrack of a mixture of film noir and Dadaism. Or the percussion that thunders on “Newspaper” that gives the track an unstable tempo that throws the melody out of place all the time - not that Fiona realized it, or cared. Even in a simpler and more stable composition like “Ladies”, the instrumental gives more gravity to the lyrics and to Fiona herself.
And you have to talk about Fiona. What an animal. What this woman projects in these compositions is what ends up giving life to everything. She shows a special kind of character; she allows herself to break metaphorically and literally, and that's what gives her performance so much power. The power of mantras is seen in songs like "Relay", where she takes a powerful phrase - "Evil is a relay sport when the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch" - and turns the symbolic circularity of the phrase into a literal circularity by not stopping singing it, adding layers and layers of both harmonics and background voices. "Under the Table" and "Cosmonauts" play with the peculiarity of her sardonic voice until Fiona ends up getting tired, and enters a kind of trance whose fury seems to have no end; the same thing happens in the chorus of “Heavy Balloon”, in which she practically sounds like another person, if she sounds like one at all. Quietly she can unfold and show multiple facets of herself at the same time - in the title track she literally does that, where she adds a second voice reciting the lyrics. And the peak of his prowess is in the raw and brutal “For Her,” a furious piece performed by a 7-headed chameleon monster who can't help but show its humanity as it goes, until it collapses - but on its own terms.
And it is in those very terms where the themes of the album resonate. It takes a lot of empathy and self-awareness to be able to talk about cycles of abuse as tactfully as Fiona does here. She manages to gather several points by becoming aware of her problems of being able to relate to other women, making a critical reading of the patriarchal system that leads women to compete with each other instead of being aware that they are fighting the same fight. Trivial topics like “Shameika,” where she remembers the first time she felt valued by a girl in early high school, or how she realizes her power to be able to speak in social circumstances as in "Under the Table". Possibly the hardest moments are in “Relay”, and how she cannot get out of the resentment towards others for her own problems and history of abuse, until she realizes that she must be the one who breaks that cycle - moment in which, appropriately, the song falls apart with her. “Newspaper”, a brutal track in its melodic composition, revolves around the same lyrical ideas of feeling competitive with another woman, as if stalking her, in which both - again, appropriately - spin on the same man. Even more brutal is “For Her”, a song written for a rape survivor, in which Fiona examines with terrifying lucidity the situation of a man who takes advantage of the system, possibly without realizing it, leaving hell around him (“Like you know you should know, but you don't know what you did”).
From that hell, it is where Fiona rebuilds, with a lot of work and a lot of dedication, her relationship with the world around her. The title already says it - fetch the bolt cutters, it’s been in there too long. She sings those lines very delicately, but with great certainty in them. Possibly the most liberating and progressive theme is “Ladies”, an ode to solidarity between women that looks with disdain at the man who cheated on her, and with affection and patience at the woman with whom he cheated, leaving grudges in the past and knowing that trying to compare herself to her is pointless - the melancholy coming with the fact that she’ll never be able to get close to her. And, in the middle of it all, Fiona takes her time to analyze her own trust and disaffection issues through the album, as she is lucid enough to see the work she must do in order to move on.
It won't be a perfect record - the beginning and end of the record fail to match the sonic and lyrical progression of the rest of the tracks, and Fiona tends to rely too much on repetition at times. But considering all the successes it has, Fetch the Bolt Cutters is a marvel, an ode to self-respect and respect for others that would be crucial any time it came out, but still makes itself felt in these times. It's good to know that one of the most influential artists of the century will continue to influence for decades to come, because this is inspiring music, not only because of its courage and accessibility, but also because it encourages the listener to go for more, and be better. See you next time you feel like it, Fiona.
I really wish folks would become less obsessed with whether Fetch the Bolt Cutters is “perfect”. It’s a messy, disjointed art-house album. It’s not meant to be “perfect”. Pitchfork is the only place that claimed it was “perfect”. An album can be a masterpiece and not be perfect. People have got to let that “perfect” stuff go.
Brat isn’t one of my favorite albums of the year. But I do think it’s been undervalued.