Review Summary: Checkmate.
It’s easy to want to play detective with an album as eminently personal as Saya Gray’s
19 Masters—to link comprehensively the presumed subjective state of the artist with the creative forms they deploy, to pull stylistic triggers until one of them turns out to have been attached to Chekhov’s gun. After all, the album’s very title implies intimacy through the act of displaying an incomplete product. “Welcome to my world” is the English translation of
19 Masters’ two-second Japanese spoken word intro, but suddenly we’re hearing Gray call bull***: “No, you’re not sorry, so why say it?”, goes the album’s acerbic first lyric, as if “her world,” Gray’s, were delimited fully or at least prominently by the mental gymnastics this interlocutor is always making her play. If the statement “Welcome to my world” functions, as I’d say it does, like a curtain opening onto a panorama of Gray’s psyche, and if, by the time the drama of her life has opened for us, she’s
already engaged in the mechanics of refusal, does that mean our narrator-protagonist-artist’s world is purely reactive, that any form of growth she experiences will always already be yoked to the angst and embarrassment of the troubled people she lets into her lives?
You get the gist—art as a puzzle to be unlocked in order to reveal psychology. But
19 Masters is too slippery to capture through simplistic relationships between mood and melody—you “understand” this album like a two-year-old understands a rerun of soap opera playing on the kitchen TV, eventually if at all arriving at some sort of comprehension of emotion by first being hit with a flurry of sensations: colors, shapes, the outlines of things.
Contra the album’s spiky opening lyric, I detect no trace of passivity or adulterated will in the manner in which Gray
constructs her tracks as a producer and songwriter, even if the flood of vibrant sonic ideas ultimately encourages quiet reverence and slack-jawed fascination as a likely
response to its intensity. Gray, in other words, has both hands on the steering wheel from the beginning; if your taste is like mine, *** takes like literally five seconds to start turning the *** up. More than a manifesto, that opening line, “No, you’re not sorry,” when decked out with heavenly harp effects and unusually powerful bass harmonies and this weird Bach-ish counterpoint thing presiding over it all, provides a shock to the system, a rush of sonic pleasure so intense that the listener is made to deprioritize the evening’s chores, made to squirm with excitement in their chair, to mimic the goosenecked follow-through of a highly refined three-point shot, to say “swish,” to say “Kobe!” with all the ecstatic energy of a John Keats, seemingly unable control his alarming and posssibly fatal level of arousal at the thought of the metaphysical liaison between truth and beauty. In fifteen years, art-pop boys will be going bananas blasting
19 Masters in the locker room before the big Chantal Akerman screening.
This telltale slipperiness, the ineffable generation of depth
through surface, is partially a function of just how much *** Gray throws at the wall, or conversely how few ideas she seems to have left on the cutting-room floor—wind bowl solos, “Self Control”-ish expanses of plangent acoustic guitar, overwhelming blasts of marching drum, curlicued jazz progressions linked seamlessly to catchy statements of intense angst, etc. Saya Gray knows by heart, makes part of her practice, the confounding circumstance that people inevitably get more
and less confusing as you get to know them better. Gray, in addition, clearly wants intimacy and mystery both, and what better way, she seems to assert to us, to maximize each of these sensations, and their weirdly dialectical relationship to each other, than by stuffing each song with not two nor three but like fourteen, perhaps forty, ideas? Gray, throughout the duration of
19 Masters, is able to sustain and emphasize both the pleasure of each single melodic phrase and the disimbrication of the parts—with each other, and with the whole to which they putatively add up. The wondrous McDonald’s Playspace of sounds that is
19 Masters bespeaks unity and focus through the meticulous construction of the individual parts, and bespeaks fragmentation through how the pieces are (or aren’t) compiled. Contradiction and ambiguity lie at the heart of
19 Masters’ intricate braid of folky pop, lyrical soul-baring, and unceasing structural experimentation.
This aesthetic tightrope act resonates on all possible scales when it comes to the breathtaking experience of listening to
19 Masters all the way through. The magisterial “WISH U PICKED ME…”, a big highlight followed immediately on the tracklist by two more, opens with yet another bit of genius lyrical compression: “If I could say one thing, / it would be, it would be, it would be…” My diseased English-teacher brain wonders if “it would be” acts here as a mere echo, an abstract phenomenon contingent on physical surroundings more than anything else, or if a quotation mark should be placed in front of each iteration of the phrase “It would be,” so that the very thing she wishes she could enunciate is the recursive, unproductive anticipation that she might one day have something to say…
19 Masters is often fun to think about in this manner, but what really makes that circular lyric ring out is not our intellectual reconstruction of the psychology behind it—instead, it’s the sonic ambiance established by the closely-mic’d guitars and ghostly stacks of vocal phrases issuing forth those lyrics. As with all of
19 Masters, the disparate stylistic strategies distributed throughout “WISH U PICKED ME…”—arpeggiated acoustic, strummed acoustic, self-harmonizing, and overwhelmingly sonorous reverb all—have been corralled into a gorgeous deluge of experimental folk that we love because it teaches us, and that teaches us because we love it.
19 Masters gives us an aesthetic education through the very manner in which it “hits” us, in other words.
Knowing what it’s like to be buffeted about, day in and day out, by forces greater than herself, Gray chooses to resist, not through an act of disavowal of lived experience but through its creative opposite—a deep engagement with the internal and external dilemmas of her past.
19 Masters describes a lot of events, sure—things that happened to the narrator, times she was forced to change her mind, reversals of fortune. What makes
19 Masters sing, though, is the absurd level of inventiveness Gray brings to these documentary fragments; it is this superlative level of musical fearlessness that renders
19 Masters, itself, into an event. Your move, ***ty boyfriend.
