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The rapturous response to Marcus Brown’s debut album as Nourished by Time, 2023’s Erotic Probiotic 2, has come to look extra like future. After years of strange jobs, false begins, and aborted creative experiments, the Baltimore native and Berklee School of Music alum spent COVID holed up in his dad and mom’ basement concocting a brand new sound, blithely unconcerned about what the world may suppose. Armed with Ableton, electrical guitar, and a Roland Juno-106 synthesizer, Brown blended dream pop, ’80s R&B, deep home, electro-funk, hip-hop, and Baltimore membership in daring, authentic methods whereas expressing socialist concepts and religious issues in an earnest, bare baritone redolent of the Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan and Jodeci’s Ok-Ci Hailey. It’s tough to fathom the file as a debut; it has the timeworn air of an album that took years to make—and the fast-and-free ethos of a practiced savant lastly prepared to let it fly.
Since Erotic Probiotic 2’s launch final spring, Brown has landed a great deal of new followers, vital acclaim, cross-the-pond tour dates, and a freshly inked cope with XL Recordings, although he’s change into skeptical of such standard measures of success. “That is now an extension of my labor,” he stated in a latest interview. “It’s one other model of working at Complete Meals, simply, like, rather a lot cooler.” Nourished by Time’s newest EP, Catching Chickens, expands upon Erotic Probiotic 2’s sprawling, singular universe whereas additionally hinting at new sounds, shapes, and textures he may discover down the highway. As ever, incisive political insights and poignant feelings shine via the mutant style melds, reaffirming the sneakily transgressive nature of Brown’s strategy to pop.
At its finest, Catching Chickens subverts playful, exuberant moods with biting social commentary. On opener “Hell of a Experience,” Brown laments the ills of late-stage capitalism over ’80s dance euphoria: “Youngsters caught within the matrix/They know when it’s fiction/Younger, inhaling them toxins/Used to have a 3rd place now they received no choices.” After the refrain (“the pink, the blue, and even the white… by no means felt like mine”), the tune dissolves into hole guitars and warbling synths, sketching an ambiguous sonic image of what societal collapse may really feel like: terrifying but cathartic, isolating but inspiring. Lead single “Hand on Me” bops with stretchy synths and vocal harmonies, detailing a forlorn but impassioned love—romantic or in any other case—that’s each comforting and psychosis-inducing. These songs replicate Brown’s uncanny means to sofa complicated material in pleasant DIY pop. He by no means strains to mesh kind with content material; as a substitute, the 2 are all the time inextricably and effortlessly linked.
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