Review Summary: Mamaleek's most glorious mess yet
Mamaleek’s coherence is that of fluidity, in a weird formlessness that refuses to construct itself in concrete terms, in structures that conform to lines, planes or timelines. Tribute is given in moments, in wisps of jazz-flute or blue-eyed soul, in moments of time that are excised and pasted into the present, collaged around the morose bellow and jagged riffs that are as startlingly straightforward as they are brief. It’s a sound that, while still rooted in the sludgy avant-metal they've been plying for a few albums now, percolates beyond the rim of the cup of structure, spilling onto the counter and infecting everything it touches. Lead single Vileness Slim, with its messy-ass jazz solo grinding against the choir and the warbling whistle, touches upon the familiar and, by its fleetingness and seemingly senseless juxtaposition with it, making it uncanny to the point of nightmares.
The most startling thing about
Vida Blue then, is that musical convention, the blues scale, the doo-wop harmony, smooth-jazz, castanets and xylophones, are all done for the most part perfectly conventionally. It’s the arrangement that thickens this sludge, their sprawling world-vomit made something so alien by its arrangement as to be repellent. Mamaleek have certainly done this before to some degree:
Cabrini Green and
Diner Coffee were less self consciously avant compared to now because their wholesale pastiche of jazz and blues elements were stapled coherently with their avant-metal hellsounds. Here, though, it’s as though they looked at damn-near everything, middle-eastern flutes, folk touches, drones, a trash-slide of discarded styles and just poured it in their crucible.
Mamaleek’s intent with
Vida Blue is pretty far from inspiring immediate love and devotion, perhaps more than any other album in their lengthy discography. The big moments are as off-putting as anything that’s come before it; when this album feels rewarding, its in those bits of startling familiarity shining through their meticulously disjointed musical chimera, in the consciousness with which Mamaleek chooses to alienate, and then tantalize. That it works in the immediate moment isn't any great surprise, it's just too off the rails to do anything but fascinate. If the album endures beyond those times when it still startles and alarms, (and there's more than enough actual meat here to suggest it will) it will be because few acts are able willing to try to capture this madness. Here, more than at any other point in their career, Mamaleek’s originality is rooted in derivation from every source under the sun, which makes them immediately more honest than most bands trying to play the experimental card, their unsettled sensibility one that denies that contradiction is even possible in the face of a present that can incorporate every era, every sound, every idea and sensibility into itself.
It can’t be all that surprising that the intent of
Vida Blue is one of tribute when Mamaleek have seeming infected so many styles with their particular disease. A tribute to a baseball star, no less, but moreso to the idea of tribute itself, of the withering away of every legacy and the birth and rebirth of new legends and stories. It feels as though what Mamaleek have done, rather than write an avant-garde metal album about a baseball player, is to write a tribute to the nature of tribute itself, the album’s namesake a symbol and signpost to mark the maze-like road they’ve set themselves on. It goes without saying that the unseen figure looming over this project is Eric Livingston, longtime collaborator and recent member, whose passing last year was movingly eulogized by the band. The endless shift of loss and legacy, the past’s relation to the present, the little fragments, documents and sounds that shape our understanding of it, and how it creates us are seemingly dumped in a pile in front of us. There’s nothing to sift through, except in our futile, but necessary effort to put some meaning to that ungraspable, undifferentiated mass in front of us. Most music seeks to put some order, some meaning to that mass. At heart,
Vida Blue is no different, but it distinguishes itself by describing, with perfect clarity, just what a chaos is given to us, and what a struggle it is to make sense of it. As Mamaleek state, “Time is a slippery fish”.
