Photo: Bandcamp
Another musician with an impressive CV, Brijean Murphy, who plays percussion on Chris Cohen’s Paint a Room, and has done the same for Toro Y Moi and Mitski, has released her third album.
Brijean may release music under her first name, but they’re actually a duo, with Doug Stuart producing and providing instrumentation.
And while there’s definitely a focus on rhythm, on Macro the pair set out to broaden into new terrain.
Tracks like ‘Bang Bang Boom’ offer insistent tempo and impetus, but liner notes to Macro point out Brijean’s efforts to diversify. There are references to loss colouring the songwriting, and an opening quote that emphasises life’s balance of “beauty and terror”.
Nothing here is too terrifying. In fact it’s all thoroughly soothing, if sometimes wistful.
There are touches of sixties pop and seventies disco, and on ‘Euphoric Avenue’, a bed of strings, sweetening Murphy’s lyrics about “worlds of beauty and pain”.
On past releases Brijean have explored similarly lush, tropical sounds, always drifting back to the steady thump of house music. Here though, they make room for the likes of ‘Roxy’, an acoustic ballad with similarly retro flourishes, and love song lyrics with imagery from the natural world like waterfalls and mountaintops.
There’s an interesting kind of fake out midway through the album. A track called ‘Counting’, which acts as a kind of intro for the following ‘Counting Sheep’, has a beat not too far removed from Sabrina Carpenter’s mega hit ‘Espresso’, but when the song hits properly, the drums are replaced by a machine, and bops along on an arrangement that’s less crowd-pleasing, but richer and more interesting.
I may not think that Macro is as genre-busting as Brijean make out, but the variances keep things interesting as they strut down their particular musical avenue.
Tracks like the closing ‘Laura’ fully deliver on their sonic ambitions, layers of percussion under splashy drums, jazz flute interjections, and an irresistible groove. The themes may vary, but the vibes are always on point.
