J. Mamana – For Every Set of Eyes (2024)

Review by Sophie Kemp: J. Mamana’s music appeals to a bookish set. It asks that you maybe already like Mahler and Bartók. It implies that you might subscribe to the literary journal n+1, where you will find an ad for Mamana’s album in the pages of the newest issue. (Perhaps you will have already read his n+1 essay from last year, about the Ethiopian composer Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru.) It is tricky to be so expressly referential in music without being a snore. Mamana’s “It’s Bastille Day,” which is about Bastille Day, includes a particularly jarring Françoise Hollande name-check that doesn’t quite pay off. And For Every Set of Eyes isn’t exactly an easy listen. It demands that you focus and pay attention to how everything swirls together. Somehow, he more or less pulls it off. As was clear from his last record, Nothing New in the West, Mamana is most comfortable writing extraordinarily high-concept songs, some of which are indebted to Beethoven. But his work is also very much in conversation with baroque indie pop composers Koenig and Longstreth. Unlike Longstreth, who wrote a sexy pop song about goblins, or Koenig, who wrote one about eating falafel, Mamana is entrenched in the baroque. He writes impenetrable music that is both deeply rooted in Kabbalah and also about fast food. In “New America,” he sets the Magi and Belshazzar near a Wendy’s. It is kind of like a Van Dyke Parks song, ridiculously ornate, exactly what you would want to hear while riding a cartoon stick horse through Camelot. You might be tempted to write off opener “Genius or Apostle” as vaudeville, pure Sondheim with its melodrama, its sweeping strings, its operatic vocals, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. Mamana encourages and delights in these provocations. Watch this! the song demands in its final two minutes, as Mamana shifts from grandiosity into something absolutely twisted. Its pyrotechnics become a laser light show. It becomes a scenario where you are trying to tell a joke while on acid and just trying to grip onto the floor. You are scared. The strings are compressed, they become electrified, electronic. It’s so weird and twisted you can’t look away. And it is glorious in its commitment to being just that: weird. It ends with a choir. This is what makes For Every Set of Eyes special and good almost in spite of itself. It is freak music and it is not self-conscious about it. It forgoes any ambition to be “cool.” The saxophones that split “Years of Lead” in two come at a point where Mamana talks about wanting to hold on to someone, tight. The eight-minute long “No Fun” is about death, broken up by Mamana saying “fuck” a bunch. The strings feel like you’re looking down from a bluff, or starring in the video for “Wuthering Heights.” All of the song’s sweeping gestures, its key changes and sudden collapses in form, are underpinned by grief. This is Mamana at his best: when his ambition matches this honesty. There’s a line in “Tenderness Lost,” weird and real and true, that encapsulates this perfectly: “Basic and basically alive,” he sings. In other words: real as fuck, beautiful, alone, painful. — pitchfork

Track List: 01-Genius or Apostle 02-Years of Lead 03-Tenderness Lost 04-Hope Saved July 05-New America 06-Autumn 07-It's Bastille Day 08-Ruins Handed Down 09-Before the Law 10-No Fun 11-By the Whipping of the Horse

Media Report: Genre: art pop, chamber pop Origin: Providence, Rhode Island, USA Image error Format: FLAC Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec Bit rate mode: Variable Channel(s): 2 channels Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz Bit depth: 16 bits Compression mode: Lossless Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)

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