He’s turning on comparable motifs: being an grownup man but in addition being six years previous, hanging out, protecting it actual. “New Seashore Music” has him singing traces like “I don’t know Tarzan! I don’t know Jane!” over some kind of classic surf music pattern. “Contact Truly” is dramatic strings paired with dumpster drum machines. “Belief” has Useful screaming over an epic canned guitar riff, his voice breaking as if a boy in a boy choir. “Bandage Off,” has us serious about “Mary Poppins and the purses.” All of that is enjoyable to hearken to by itself, however it’s not rather more than that.
There’s a homogeneity that plagues these 17 songs: Take heed to them again and again and so they all mix collectively, like they may have come from any document Useful has ever remodeled the previous ten years. The tracks consistently repeat Useful’s producer tag (“Lucy sweetie! Time to stand up!”), and a few, like “Unusual As Can Be” and “I Do,” contain solely the slightest variation on pattern, drum machine, vocals. It strikes me much less as cohesive and extra as unambitious, a lot in order that his sound— which I’ve in any other case at all times discovered to be particular and pure and bizarre—comes throughout as generic, a facsimile of itself. After all he would do one thing like interpolate Céline Dion whereas shrieking about “being dangerous for no cause.” We’ve seen that earlier than. A lot of his earlier music sounds free-associative and boundlessly artistic, how “first thought, finest thought” sounds when it’s actually working. As a substitute, Cooper B. Useful’s Album, Vol. 9 is, at its highest, “random.”
There’s something to be mentioned for consistency. However isn’t there one thing radical, thrilling, invigorating about taking what you’re keen on about music and increasing it, bringing it to completely different, larger, scarier lands? Whereas I used to be listening to Useful’s newest, I couldn’t assist however take into consideration Meg Remy’s U.S. Women undertaking. Remy, too, began out as an actual outsider in pop music. As a substitute of sampling Disney films, she made closely distorted music knowledgeable by midcentury lady teams and ’90s R&B. Over time, Remy went from making music about pop to creating music that was pop: pushing herself in a path that was sleekier and shiner however misplaced none of her music’s creativity, its weirdness, its complexity, its politics. Maybe her work could possibly be a blueprint for Useful. Likewise, listening to Useful’s tune with Boy Harsher convinces me that Useful may be extra than simply constant—that, if he needs, he could make music that isn’t solely difficult for us, however is difficult for himself, too.
