The Being Dead duo put out one of my very favorite albums of last year, Zero Percent APR’s Higher and Higher Forever. They consistently identify and deliver strange causes for celebration in a homogenized period of concentrated wealth and rights restrictions that desperately needs them. The whimsy and wrath is what is warranted, having fun in hell, and holding court on the ineffable indelible shit. Artpop can be good and have a big heart.
A couple of real go getters. Weird but with good cause. Good movements. Melodies as intricate and warbling as the sentiments, complexities that interlock amusingly but always cater first to the feeling of the thing. You, too, could be telling stories in content and form. Probably not this good, but you can do it as evidenced by this thing existing, it’s proof.
There’s plenty taken from convention, the shared language and lineage of pop and anti-folk that makes the work approachable. But every track is also subverted with such care and conviction, ensuring that each effort/song finds a path that leads somewhere new and rewarding. Please just read Szarkowski on the thicket for a brief and compelling summary of this manner of work:
“When Lee Friedlander made the photograph reproduced here he was playing a kind of game. The game is of undetermined social utility and might on the surface seem almost frivolous. The rules of the game are so tentative that they are automatically (though subtly) amended each time the game is successfully played. The chief arbiter of the game is Tradition, which records in a haphazard fashion the results of all previous games, in order to make sure that no play that won before will be allowed to win again. The point of the game is to know, love, and serve sight, and the basic strategic problem is to find a new kind of clarity within the prickly thickets of unordered sensation. When one match is successfully completed, the player can move on to a new prickly thicket.”
Slack is anticipated, and the line is cut before it tangles or tied into a bow. Examples are the emphatic lull in phrasing, setting up the spelling of Muriel with a long pause that adds additional equivocating “like this:” or the ‘TV Time’ bridge that reads like a medley-merger and the verses recounting of an immediate return to the shoe store.
All of this can be coopted and killed. And will be, but for now it isn’t and that is good. Discs, tapes, records, digital, all available here, and releasing the 14th of July.
Plainly & Painfully 
