Review Summary: Ought to be good.
Quite the waves Ought have made over the years by just, just balancing between art- and post-punk. Now, on their latest record, it seems like they are embarking on a slightly more musically odyssean concepts. Their previous outputs always had a grand sense of rawness and deliberate decadence, while
Room Inside the World definitely ventures into more subtle, emotionally torn and musically fatigued territories. If the singles didn’t serve as enough of a hint that this will be very different from Ought’s usual work, then you are hopelessly lost. But it is indeed a grand turn around the ol’ genre style assortment and a much mellower head-straight dig into them chilling waters of melancholy and subtlety with an elating song-writing mastery like barely anyone can accomplish.
Somehow, apart from the drastically more sorrowful and biting musical goodness, it is Tim Darcy’s vocals that changed minimally and yet still convey entirely different emotions than they did before. It seems that the band found that thin margin line, where song-writing, instrumentation, production and vocals work in such a perfect symbiosis that Darcy’s vocals to some once potentially irritating turned into affectionate and surprisingly gorgeous, guitars went from sporadic and raw to calmingly fondling, drums jumped off their spasticity to become more benign and kind. Any yet they on a surface level they seem as close to their past forms, as if nothing had changed. But everything has. With this output Ought defined musical maturity.
And much to anyone’s surprise, while delving into the usual art-punk/post-punk musings and lyrical themes, the band still managed to avoid sounding typical for the genre. They are not disjointed and apathetic, nor bitter and depressed, and neither are they snarky and ironic. They are calm and realistic, not drowning in their own brood or trying to resist the worldly struggles with a contra-slap. Ought face their issues and problems directly, patiently and with a profound confidence and a private understanding.
Track after track we are delivered a slightly different musical reality. Opening “Into the Sea” is neither overwhelming, nor underwhelming, nor anxious to inscribe itself in your memory. It perspicaciously tends to your deepest psychological needs of having something to come back to. And in case of “Into the Sea” that ‘something’ is a certain melodic mystery, a hard-to-define structure that intrigues, but doesn’t reveal all of its cards. It leaves much to be explored upon revisiting, which the song’s mystique practically forces you to do.
Within the reach of more on-the-nose, if that is a term that has a place to be when it comes to describing this record, is a song “Disgraced in America”. This track ravages the previously established purposeful vagueness and cuts through into assertive atmospheric asceticism, an indulgence further prolonged in the scathing “Disaffection”.
But that sweet despondency suddenly finds a blind end with what must be not just the album’s, but the band’s all-career most sophisticated effort, “These 3 Things”. This bludgeoning track is such a masterfully written therapy in naturalism it makes the chorus seem not as a main epicentre of the song’s tunefulness, but its mere consequence.
In their anti-tender vocation Ought tackled the idea of coming as close to that very border as they can by delivering as tender a songs as they could on “Desire”. And in their dysrhythmic venture they also took a quick detour down slowness path on the thematically disillusioning and musically softening, but equal part delicately chaotic, on “Brief Shield”. Moreover is that explored on later cuts, such as the unexpectedly wavy and poppy “Take Everything”. The conventional division of song structures to verse, bridge and chorus is not of their concern. If need be, the chorus will have no relevance at all. These songs are not about one part of them that is supposed to wow you; they are about engulfing you in their rich entirety.
Room Inside the World’s final moments are spent in a similar cradling atmosphere, as all that came before, but with more of an intermittent emotional hollowness. While “Pieces Wasted” contemplates on the idea of mixing a tad more sonically sharp sound with a juxtaposed defeatist vibe, the closing “Alice” presents an all throughout echoic ballad with a near-blissful virtue, gently and with care leading its listeners into that old familiar distorted pit many a post-punk acts tend to sway with their respected repetition-manoeuvres. Except on here it doesn’t deepen into despair, as in most cases, it rather sizzles out into rapturous ether.
Quite a fitting way to end this, what with the whole record painting a picture of acceptance in the face of full decay, and in the end mount up towards the full calm and understanding. Somehow, even considering most other acts who attempted a similar leap, Ought’s softening effort brought fruits that blossom, even if compared to their illustrious past successes. They prevailed. They did it. They grew up and with a full blow of sophistication and newly gained confidence delivered us a ray of light. And I cannot thank them enough.
