Think Like A Key 2024
Nostalgia For The Great American Monoculture
All-points bulletin: moving from creative headspace to societal landscape, a freedom-minded filmmaker takes his friends to the frontier of reality.
Posting a sentry at the rabbit hole is a tricky enterprise which, preventing an inattentive passerby from falling, can also cancel a potential adventure, and this arresting project’s eponymous platter demonstrated such an effect in style by offering a critical view of artistic struggle through a series of art-rock vignettes. But while many a listener will find that method both recursive and relatable, it may feel rather challenging once applied to social critique, especially within the borders of a single country. Of course, what’s happening in the States affects all of the world and, aware of the influence, Californian composer Alex Wroten wrote a four-act musical play where wistfulness for the wholeness of yore and cynicism conspire to reflect today’s idiosyncrasy.
Since dealing with the past has always been a difficult pastime, “Nostalgia For The Great American Monoculture” doesn’t even pretend to propose an easy sort of entertainment; more so, the presence of familiar voices doesn’t make the results of these efforts sound less strange. Yes, opener “The Good Old Days” and finale “The Bad New Days” seem sweet when Wroten’s twelve strings are wrapped around Shawn Phillips‘ mellifluous, if anxious, vocals. Yes, “Zero Interest Self-Financing” and “Someone Else Is Me, And I Feel Fine” ruffle some psychedelic feathers thanks to their subdued grandeur, the wonder of the latter enhanced by Duncan Mackay’s piano and the vigor of the former by Dave Newhouse’s woodwind. And yes, “Regulating Entrepreneurial Nirvana” is endearingly retrofuturistic in its layering of various ivories against Alex’s propulsive, tango-dancing bass and partially spoken lyrics. Yet a close look at the instrumental level of the otherwise sublimely harmonic “Trail Of Cookie Crumbs” should reveal that the titular pastry was manufactured from the croutons which accompanied larks' tongues in aspic before those morsels got processed through Henry Kaiser’s guitar.
However, THE RESIDENTS render “A Knight In Shining Tanktop” too quirky and declamatory for everyone to immediately like – unlike “The Immovable Type” whose dim violin-driven elegance is of cabaret-ogling type and “Phishing For Pigs” whose weird elements are given propulsive grooves, pastoral tunes and proper riffs to inhabit. It’s the space the creepily enchanting “How To Act Real” ought to deem peculiarly comfortable as well, but mini-opera “All The Content” dwells in this room with as much luxury as the album’s macrocosm will allow. The macrocosm that’s alluring and alienating in equal measure – enough to put “Nostalgia For The Great American Monoculture” into a class of curios many people must take a peek at.
***2/3
