Review Summary: this is not ours
If campfire singalongs existed in the
Tron universe, I think they would almost always sound like an Alt-J song. Take
Adeline, the third single from
Relaxer, with its pensive acoustic arpeggios that end up submerged in pulsating synths and a drum/string combination that sounds borrowed from any grandiose action set piece of the past decade. Alternatively, Joe Newman’s voice would befit the narration of an indie rom-com ά la
500 Days of Summer, and – when Alt-J decide to imbue the music with a sense of urgency
(In Cold Blood) – the resulting sonic landscape could well encapsulate the sounds of a bar brawl in
Peaky Blinders.
Drop the tangled filmic comparisons for a minute;
Relaxer is an eclectic yet cohesive album – the compendium of Alt-J’s defining qualities, just with more dynamics and more thematic resonance.
Last Year can testify: it’s the album’s answer to a track like
Arrival in Nara, but – similar to the rest of the record – it manages to flesh out a distinct identity, while still contributing to the perpetually schizophrenic
'Surrealist Painting of a Lovelorn Millennial' narrative that Alt-J has penned.
What does Joe Newman think of psychotropic drugs? He probably thinks they have their place.
I’ve been envisioning the image of the band’s practice/writing space, a few days empty, projected unto a big screen. The room is desultory: half-finished songs litter the floor, left in the form of knotted guitar leads and scrunched up balls of paper. They are the excess fat of this record, the product of a self-disciplined effort to streamline a gamut of wildly different ideas into one body of music. Yet it sounds like good fortune. Alt-J pull songs in from different postcodes and place them in hand-holding tandem with purpose and creativity. Case in point:
In Cold Blood snaps the record awake after the daydreaming
3WW, like its carefree (no, careless) older brother; like a bad influence vying for a violent ending.
But
Relaxer walks the line (or rather, sprints it), erasing the border between the terms ‘focused’ and ‘rushed’ until they are two sides of the same, polarizing coin – a coin that, arguably, barely boasts enough surface area to justify a cover of
that historic folk tale.
House of the Rising Sun – in its 10,000th iteration – weaves together whispered indie rock affectations, tip-toeing away from New Orleans while it debates its own spot in this eight-song long tracklist. Granted, the song is beautiful in a decidedly Alt-J way: idiosyncratic and reflective, all rolling acoustics and strings that take the Doppler effect as gospel. Its existence is a considered one, though, thematically congruous in its themes of “sin and misery”, while also functioning as an anaesthetic for a few minutes as
Hit Me Like That Snare bares it’s chipped, yellow teeth.
…Snare makes a point of going off script – its climactic refrain
(" fuck you / I’ll do / what I wanna do”) points in on the album itself and, just like a rebellious teen, leaves an absolute fucking mess for the remaining tracks to deal with.
They do – the dulcet tones of the album’s back half clean up well. Though, no matter what, I feel as voyeuristic as
Adeline’s protagonist when listening to this record, like I’m watching a group of musicians through a window as they chart their sadness and frustration through a dream emulator. It’s all so verboten-love-affair that I feel unclean plundering its content. It’s not that its raw, either –
Relaxer is appropriately massive sounding and professional in its production, lending to it a sense of immediacy that’s unusual for the band. It only amplifies the discomfort, as if someone is holding my head up to the glass while the band fumble around a range of emotions and inscrutable allegories.
Anyway, back to the shoddy filmic parallels.
Pleader, the final track, begins like a spaghetti western and morphs into a Tim Burton fever-dream. It’s histrionics (the choir! the woodwind!) ebb and flow with a universal longing. In fact, it feels like the only song we should be listening to, as though
Relaxer is letting us in the room because it needs an outsider perspective. The rest of the album seems to say all its I Love Yous and Goodnights through an air of jaded self-destruction, brought on by the knowledge that whatever it longs for is but a nothingness in the rear-view. The record itself, however, is not a nothingness; and for the moment I am okay with this.
