Review Summary: for when you accidentally brought up politics at the dinner table
dora jar’s technicolour pop landscapes express the vital distinction between ‘careless’ and ‘carefree’ by being so obviously the latter that any negative criticism i could level at it would wash off its surface like water off a duck’s back. the cheek it turns to our collective sadness blushes a bright pink but in its more subtle movements, when it intentionally acknowledges that it does not take place in a vacuum (because no art can), its inherent silliness reads as more welcoming and empathetic than capricious and mean-spirited. it will not tell you of a cure to your problem; it will listen to your complaints and ask you if you want to hear a joke in response. the kid-spirit of dora jar is NWTRWYAOF’s lifeblood: the reason for its existence and its means of survival – and yes, NWTR… has been passed down to us, inherited by us, and in its proximity a fortunate contingent of us listeners will accidentally inhale the little airborne particles of childlike awe radiating off its surface. please for your own good: look at it, look at it in its beaming, glint-toothed face.
because dora jar loves you. she does not know you, but the idea of you, the idea that an ancient wind lives inside of you, is a constant source of deep fascination for her. there are songs where she studies her object so intently she sees their mind as a clock, dissolving into the infinite backdrop, making them a character built with odd proportions. She fantasizes to an absurd degree, and that’s where the crux of the album finds itself. NWTRWYAOF is the real and the imaginary welded together – fused so completely, the molten run off so blotchy and homogenous, that it’s impossible to tell where parts of one plane end and the next begin.
some of these numbers are the stickiest folk songs you’ve ever heard, taking a single idea to its logical conclusion with quiet confidence; others use brute force to jam electronic/glitch into a pop-shaped hole. they somehow succeed. the album steps up to the soil of 2021’s ‘digital meadow’ and excavates deeper, further down, unveiling a frankly baffling mass of raw materials to play with. the swashbuckling
cannonball takes maritime pastiche and shrouds it in the grey modernity of twenty-first century new york. its alchemy only magnifies the scope of the new reality it has just invented.
dora’s penchant for imagery has a tactile quality to it. there’s a poignant line in the title track where she refers to her subject as a “ketamine angel” and though i love me a labyrinthine metaphor there is something so incredibly effective about the simple image this conjures. there is so much stirring in the middle of this line and its delivery: a love, a pity, a morbid curiosity, that seems to compress everything about this record into a morsel – allowing us to touch it, hold it, decipher it with the same attention that dora herself does to her curios. for how fantastical this record is, it’s wondrously easy to grasp and just as rewarding to pore over.
the fact this record is so vivid in its imagery is the only reason why dora is able to connect us emotionally to a reality that hitches itself to high fantasy systems and surreal, impossible daily events. the starkness of the words and the folksy musical skeletons teach us what to expect, so that every choice which subverts our expectations leaves us with a big red target on our furiously beating hearts. dora knows to follow up with a bullseye every single time.
devil eye’s repeated vocal hook casts a completely different shadow the moment the modulations morph dora’s voice – her will-o’-the-wisp voice – into something robotic. she goes immediately from sincere and gentle to cold and detached – like you and her have switched places. suddenly she’s looking over you, getting caught in her song, studying you scientifically.
this is why it is gilded with the nostalgia of a child playing with their toy houses. dora invents a new reality to play and frolic in. she burns its edges a little bit with the potential for heartbreak, betrayal, death of autonomy, but
those challenges give
these dreamlike landscapes an access point which allows us to experience them alongside her. it is this album’s lot that it humanizes its author by mythologizing the mundane. each person becomes a collapsing supernova, each death a black hole, each silence tearing itself open with a million potential present tenses. during the course of this album, you look around, and nothing in the immediate area is quite where it usually is. don’t panic; that is by design.
