Tony Stamp reviews the latest from Canadian wordsmith Andy Shauf, pop satirist U.S. Girls, and LA beatmaker Nosaj Thing.
Norm by Andy Shauf
Photo: Supplied
Canadian musician Andy Shauf came to wider attention in 2016 with his fifth album The Party. By this stage he’d been self-releasing music for ten years, hushed acoustic numbers not too far removed from the likes of Elliott Smith.
The record drew attention not just for its lovely tunes, but a lyrically conceit which saw every song narrated by a different attendee at the same event. It was an appropriate vehicle for material that smacked of introversion and social awkwardness.
He followed it with The Neon Skyline, an even more conceptually ambitious story about someone running into their ex, after reminiscing about them at a bar.
Shauf’s new album is called Norm, a title that originally stood for ‘normal’ - this was to be an album of songs without an overarching narrative. But during the writing process, Norm became the name of a character, and the driving force behind a darkly compelling tale that unfolds over twelve tracks.
While trying to write songs, Shauf experimented with reading the Bible, and writing from the perspective of God. He grew up attending church, is no longer religious, but liked the idea of the Creator as an omniscient narrator, and that ended up being part of the album’s structure.
In opening track ‘Wasted on You’, God is creating humankind, and wondering if this experiment will finish with him asking them “Was all my love wasted on you”.
It’s a line that will be echoed at the end of the album by Norm, who is introduced in the next few songs admiring a woman from afar. By track four he’s hiding in the bushes outside her house and peeking in a window, and God, observing this but misunderstanding the situation, helps Norm stay out of sight.
As the record goes on and the story it’s telling becomes more ominous, the music darkens in turn. We start to realise that Norm is a very bad dude, and around the same time, God does too. Shauf has said the central idea is "someone misunderstanding what love is", and that applies to Norm, but also God - a relatively scandalous idea that’s smuggled in here undercover of the singer’s light, zesty songwriting.
I saw Shauf perform in Auckland last year, and despite being joined by a full band, it was a notably quiet show, vocals almost whisper-level with hushed playing to match, and a riveted crowd. Capturing that sound on record was helped by mixing from Neal Pogue, who’s won Grammy awards for work on albums by Outkast and Tyler the Creator. It might seem like a counterintuitive choice, but the results speak for themselves.
At one point this was going to be a disco record, and ‘Halloween Store’ is the sole holdover from that, some of its synths intact but otherwise reworked. Later on the album ‘Long Throw’ is wistful and reflective, as benefits the story at that point, with strings and double-tracked vocals enhancing the AM radio vibe.
You could easily listen to Norm and not realise it’s telling one long story. Its songs are soft and lovely, like camouflage for some of the more radical ideas within. But Shauf’s dedication to narrative extended to him hiring a story editor, who he sent various lyrical drafts to - sometimes the throughline was too obvious, sometimes not obvious enough, but eventually they reached a point of pleasant ambiguity.
In hindsight it all becomes obvious, a satisfying tale with a twist near its end, a third narrator who misunderstands love in a similar way to Norm and God, and an open-ended, philosophical ending.
Andy Shauf may once again try to write an album that isn’t all connected after this, but I really hope he does, because the results are fascinating, and in this particular arena, he’s one of a kind.
Bless This Mess by U.S. Girls
Photo: Supplied
Starting in 2008, American musician Meg Remy has charted a deliberate course from avant garde noise to indie pop. Her work under the name U.S. Girls is still sometimes referred to as ‘experimental’, but her songs have often had hooks in them, just buried underneath layers of grit, and she’s since claimed that she always wanted to make accessible music, but lacked the means to do so.
In 2018 her creep toward fidelity took a steep upward turn with the record In A Poem Unlimited, on which she worked with twenty other musicians. Her interest in genres like disco and electronic pop fell into clear view alongside older ones like fifties doo-wop, which her voice has always seemed well-suited to. The trajectory continued on 2020’s Heavy Light, and Bless This Mess, her latest, is U.S. Girls’ shiniest effort yet, sporting a thoroughly modern sound that stemmed partly from circumstance, and is only semi-successful.
Starting the album with a reference to Greek mythology isn’t exactly unexpected or surprising from Remy - she’s always been a whip smart songwriter, and often deploys lacerating social and political satire. The ideas behind ‘Only Daedelus’ relate to that character creating wings for his son Icarus, who consequently flew too close to the son.
Remy’s rather oblique take on that, according to interviews, is that “creating anything is futile because everything eventually dies”. She said existentialism is often missing from music and wanted to include some.
Later on album high point ‘St James Way’, she draws influence from Spanish surrealist Luis Bunuel’s biography, and what she calls his “supernatural life”, over immediately compelling chord progressions and melody lines.
Bless This Mess was recorded during the height of COVID lockdowns, and is referenced lyrically too. ‘Screen Face’ tells the story of a couple who didn’t quite seal the deal before they were forced to stay in their separate homes.
Unfortunately lyrics like “My screen is not your face” already feel a bit dated in 2023, less satirical than vaguely luddite. Maybe Remy’s interest was more drawn to the concept of the duet, another thing she thinks is missing from modern music. On that track she’s joined by Canadian songwriter Michael Rault.
The last two U.S. Girls albums were heavily influenced by collaboration, tracked in studio communally, but as that was impossible this time, it was pieced together remotely with the help of digital technology. It often shows, with a lack of cohesion through the album. But the high points are high, and when this new approach is embraced it’s fruitful.
‘So Typically Now’ is disco with a modern sheen, poking fun at a very specific thing - the way young urban creatives fled Brooklyn during the pandemic to move upstate, and realising they preferred it there.
Contrasted with ‘Screen Face’ the satire really lands, with lyrics like “I sent you an image, you sent me a thumb down” executed with appropriate sass.
That track was co-written and produced by Alex Frankel of synthpop duo Holy Ghost!, and his contributions are particularly helpful in nudging U.S. Girls sound somewhere more contemporary.
Meg Remy was pregnant with twins during writing and recording, which is referenced on the final track, and the artwork and liner notes attempt to use it as an overarching theme, but calling the album Bless This Mess feels more like afterthought than intent.
Its fractured nature proves detrimental too, with around half its tracks falling somewhat flat. We should hope she keeps exploring new sounds, and doesn’t get stuck.
Continua by Nosaj Thing
Photo: Supplied
In 2018 the Los Angeles club night Low End Theory ended its twelve year run, a weekly celebration of bass that defined a particular type of beat music, and launched several careers, most notably Flying Lotus.
Another regular was Nosaj Thing, a producer who got his start playing punk and noise shows at a club called The Smell, graduated to ethereal instrumental hip hop, and on fifth album Continua, looks to keep progressing into a well-rounded songwriter, using live instrumentation, and collaborating with a range of guest vocalists.
Jason Chung is the man behind this music, and this is an album with an unmistakable vision. It’s uniformly eerie and calm, often hitting the sweet spot between melancholic and euphoric. That’s despite the breadth of its contributions.
On ‘Blue Hour’, voice is supplied by electronic artist Julianna Barwick, for a stately track that’s closer to pop than any of her solo output.
Elsewhere indie musician Toro Y Moi jumps on ‘Condition’, his energetic input dragged down to earth by Chung’s dense fog of synthesisers.
Other guests on the album include Panda Bear, rapper Pink Siifu, and crooner Serpentwithfeet, but the album’s most beautiful moment is a wordless cut called ‘Process’ that show’s Chung’s mastery of delicate melodies.
It’s unusual for beatmakers to employ an additional producer, but that’s what Nosaj Thing has done here, enlisting Quincy Jones’ grandson Sunny Levine to help tame and sculpt these tracks into a fully-formed album. It’s an admirable approach, and a sign that Jason Chung wants to keep progressing in his musical journey, which is maybe what the album title Continua is hinting at.
It’s always restrained, and often glacial. But in the wide open spaces between notes, there’s plenty of tranquillity to be found.
