He’s turning on related motifs: being an grownup man but additionally being six years outdated, hanging out, retaining it actual. “New Seaside Track” has him singing traces like “I don’t know Tarzan! I don’t know Jane!” over some form of classic surf music pattern. “Contact Really” is dramatic strings paired with dumpster drum machines. “Belief” has Useful screaming over an epic canned guitar riff, his voice breaking as if a boy in a boy choir. “Bandage Off,” has us enthusiastic about “Mary Poppins and the purses.” All of that is enjoyable to hearken to by itself, but it surely’s not rather more than that.
There’s a homogeneity that plagues these 17 songs: Take heed to them time and again and so they all mix collectively, like they may have come from any document Useful has ever revamped the previous ten years. The tracks consistently repeat Useful’s producer tag (“Lucy sweetie! Time to stand up!”), and a few, like “Unusual As Can Be” and “I Do,” contain solely the slightest variation on pattern, drum machine, vocals. It strikes me much less as cohesive and extra as unambitious, a lot in order that his sound— which I’ve in any other case at all times discovered to be particular and pure and peculiar—comes throughout as generic, a facsimile of itself. In fact he would do one thing like interpolate Céline Dion whereas shrieking about “being unhealthy for no cause.” We’ve seen that earlier than. A lot of his earlier music sounds free-associative and boundlessly inventive, how “first thought, finest thought” sounds when it’s actually working. As a substitute, Cooper B. Useful’s Album, Vol. 9 is, at its highest, “random.”
There’s something to be mentioned for consistency. However isn’t there one thing radical, thrilling, invigorating about taking what you like about music and increasing it, bringing it to totally different, larger, scarier lands? Whereas I used to be listening to Useful’s newest, I couldn’t assist however take into consideration Meg Remy’s U.S. Ladies venture. Remy, too, began out as an actual outsider in pop music. As a substitute of sampling Disney films, she made closely distorted music knowledgeable by midcentury lady teams and ’90s R&B. Over time, Remy went from making music about pop to creating music that was pop: pushing herself in a path that was sleekier and shiner however misplaced none of her music’s creativity, its weirdness, its complexity, its politics. Maybe her work might be a blueprint for Useful. Likewise, listening to Useful’s track with Boy Harsher convinces me that Useful could be extra than simply constant—that, if he needs, he could make music that’s not solely difficult for us, however is difficult for himself, too.
