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Amen Dunes’ music is persuasive, nevertheless it’s not all the time clear what it’s attempting to steer you of. For the reason that launch of his confrontationally noisy debut album, DIA, 15 years in the past, Damon McMahon has regularly refined the remit of his sound—shaving away the haze, juicing the weather drawn from pop and basic rock—however stored the narratives comparatively indirect. Listening to his final album, 2018’s Freedom, felt slightly like attempting to learn a Nice American Novel by holding it as much as a reflecting pool: concepts about loss and familial ties lower by means of, even when whole sentences had been powerful to string collectively. It was a private report, however hardly ever a clarifying one; you bought the sense that McMahon would somewhat preserve his lyrics obscure than boil down his concepts into one thing digestible.
The concepts on Dying Jokes, his self-produced sixth album, are clearer. He’s blunter and extra forceful with particular which means on this album than ever. Broadly, it’s an apocalypse story, by which humanity’s ultimate moments on Earth are tormented by the identical ills which have stalked us for hundreds of years: hatred, greed, puritanism. Misunderstanding is a recurring theme, as is loneliness, particularly the sort that arises when the state fails to maintain its residents. For all this pessimism, although, McMahon’s tackle life, which he returns to repeatedly on Dying Jokes, is easy and optimistic: “Some day we lose it/So use it.”
These concepts are filtered by means of warped hip-hop and rave beats, though the peculiarities of McMahon’s phrasing and melodies—his music is all the time surging or undulating, hardly ever taking a streamlined route—imply that Dying Jokes sounds quintessentially Amen Dunes. Whether or not bleating over a sputtering 909 on the Lil Peep-inspired “Rugby Baby” or singing an electro-reggae lullaby on “Purple Land,” McMahon is at a degree in his profession the place he may by no means be mistaken for anybody else, and though Dying Jokes is stuffed with odd particulars, just like the minimal techno interlude “Predator” or the garbled lo-fi samples on the finish of “Boys,” the muscular melodic strains that emerged on Freedom and 2014’s Love nonetheless come by means of.
That reference to the remainder of McMahon’s music is welcome, as a result of Dying Jokes may be arduous to parse, and would appear hammily provocative within the mistaken mild. It opens with a pattern of a Woody Allen joke, and on the beautiful, nine-minute penultimate observe “Around the World,” basically the ultimate music earlier than a observe made fully of samples, he sings about children “getting stoned/On their telephones/They’re so lonely and don’t know why.” However McMahon by no means looks as if he’s tut-tutting or finger-wagging a lot as interesting for forgiveness and generosity. On “Mary Anne,” a pastoral nation ballad addressed to one of many ladies who sexually abused him as a baby, he sounds compassionate (“In Purgatory, we each acquired misplaced/Once we meet once more, we’ll catch up love”) however terse (“I do know you say who we’re is identical/Properly we aren’t the identical.”) Different songs, like “Boys” and “Rugby Baby,” are portraits of violent folks pushed by forces they’ll’t absolutely management. It doesn’t really feel like McMahon is exalting victimhood, or condemning some obscure idea of “cancel tradition,” as a lot as looking for shades of grey in an more and more black-and-white world.
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