Review Summary: 'Happiness Complete' is a musical tapestry- and the beauty is in the stitches.
For those unfamiliar, the Kuleshov Effect is the proposition, originally by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, that a viewer derives more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from either shot in isolation. To reduce the concept even further:
context is everything. Any lone artistic idea is ultimately subservient to the structure it is placed within, to the glue that binds it to the ideas surrounding it. Raw footage, for whatever beauty a given frame may contain, is largely meaningless until it is imbued with meaning by the editor.
Happiness Complete is, before anything else, a showcase for Clark Barclay's skills as an editor. As the album’s cover art suggests, he approaches the songs here not unlike collages, but they could just as easily be montages, skimming over vast swaths of music and compressing a half-dozen choice moments into a single, coherent impression. The samples culled from years’ worth of thrift-store crawls, his own bandmates’ original contributions, and even the vinyl crackle itself- Barclay takes it all as building blocks, isolated shots to be lovingly woven together into an immersive, cinematic listening experience.
Don’t be deceived by the slim 28-minute runtime–
Happiness Complete’s musical density makes it every bit as substantive as most albums twice its length. Again, the name of the game is context. For as impressive as any element is by itself, their interplay is what ultimately stands out, and there are a lot of elements interplaying here. Listen as Bobby Salehnejad’s molten-lava guitar lead on “West Coast For Suuure” dissolves and mutates into a G-funk keyboard line, exposing a mind-bending cross-section of the Golden State’s cultural history in the process. The transition is what gives the whole thing depth, meaning, a feeling that goes beyond mere aesthetic fulfillment. As the album progresses, it becomes apparent that tricks like these are The Bins’ bread and butter. Highlights include Michael Birnbryer-Lao’s saxophone stampeding out from “Somewhere”’s lush bed of fingerstyle plucking and slinky film noir trip-hop, and “Santa Cruz Mountains”’s ingenious melding of mid-70s psychedelic pop with a surging boom-bap beat, but from start to finish there’s hardly a moment that doesn’t prove rewarding in its own right. Even the interstitial snippets of dialogue do an admirable job expositing the world The Bins create here, populating it with a colorful cast of voices saturated in the wonder of their surroundings.
It all builds to a head on “Beijos”,
Happiness Complete’s closing track and crown jewel. In five and a half minutes, it summarizes everything Barclay and The Bins are about in a dizzying rush of folk guitar strums, carnival organs, strings, horns, funk licks and bass runs, and a cavalcade of sampled vocalists. It is simultaneously joyful and melancholic, nostalgic and forward-thinking, imbued with explosive abandon yet never anything less that completely controlled. At times, there are too many layers to even discern what’s coming off wax and what’s being played live, and the track briefly becomes a gestalt entirely unto itself. Each sound contributes to the whole, but it’s the space in between those sounds where The Bins find something warm and alive and definitively
theirs.
