He’s turning on related motifs: being an grownup man but in addition being six years outdated, hanging out, preserving it actual.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 Truly” 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 eager about “Mary Poppins and the purses.” All of that is enjoyable to take heed to by itself, but it surely’s not far more than that.
There’s a homogeneity that plagues these 17 songs: Hearken to them again 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 all the time discovered to be particular and pure and bizarre—comes throughout as generic, a facsimile of itself. After all he would do one thing like interpolate Céline Dion whereas shrieking about “being unhealthy for no motive.” We’ve seen that earlier than. A lot of his earlier music sounds free-associative and boundlessly artistic, how “first thought, greatest 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 stated for consistency. However isn’t there one thing radical, thrilling, invigorating about taking what you’re keen on about music and increasing it, bringing it to completely 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 undertaking. 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 route 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 tune with Boy Harsher convinces me that Useful will be extra than simply constant—that, if he needs, he could make music that isn’t solely difficult for us, however is difficult for himself, too.