REVIEW: Tune-Yards - I can feel you creep into my private life

Laura Kerry

When facing a challenging political climate, music often falls into two different camps: escapism or head-on confrontation. Tune-Yards’ new album does both.

The group’s first album in three years, I can feel you creep into my private life responds to the current moment. More specifically, it is a response to two very of-the-moment—to an almost comical degree—experiences that Merrill Garbus, the duo’s frontwoman, had in the past year: a DJ residency that catapulted her into the world of dance music, and a six-month workshop on what it means to be white in America at the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland that fostered a better understanding of her “participation in racism and white supremacy.” The result is an exuberant album that is equal parts danceable and politically engaged.

The first of those two sensations to come across is the former. Starting with the opener, “Heart Attack,” Garbus and her collaborator Nate Brenner build a track that with its clapping percussion, sputtering melody, funky bass, and variations of the four-on-the-floor rhythm, impels the listener to move. Here, Garbus poses her message in fragments of more abstract and personal imagery (“Let me speak / Let me breathe / Oh, let me be”). Here, as in many other places on the album, the sound and feel of the music—a more focused and beat-driven version of Tune-Yards’ signature energetic freneticism—outweighs the content of the lyrics. While this has the effect of slightly muting the message, it also means that the listener is hooked by the time they start to consider meaning. There’s also something sneakily transgressive about propelling an audience to dance unsuspectingly to music with political motivations.

While Garbus couches much of her social justice bent in glittering pop and an introspective gaze, it occasionally pierces through the surface of I can feel you creep with clear—and sometimes clunky—force. On “ABC 123,” a song whose simple balance of bouncy bass, buoyant percussion, and catchy melody make it one of the clearest and most fun on the album, the artist swings between loftiness (“Sitting in the middle of the sixth extinction”) and intimacy (“I want so badly to be liked”), ultimately addressing the audience directly with the cheer, “No abstentions! VOTE.”

Like the call-to-action on “ABC 123,” the  most straightforward of the political lyrics on the album can feel jarring, like a blunt wack across the head in contrast to the rest of Garbus’ deft deliveries. On “Colonizer,” for example, when she sings over a deep bass in a voice scratchy with effects, “I use my white woman voice to tell stories of travels with African men… / I cry my white woman tears carving grooves in my cheeks to display what I meant,” it feels downright uncomfortable. It’s hard to tell whether that discomfort comes from confronting my own complicity in the privilege that Garbus sings about, or if it stems from the feeling that a white woman acknowledging “white woman tears” in song still calls attention to herself in the problematic way that crying—and subsequently broadcasting—white woman tears does in the first place.

According to Tune-Yards' new album, though, beginning to disentangle that kind of discomfort is a necessary effort. It’s important to recognize and talk about it. And, in the midst of that effort, Garbus offers, you can always dance.

REVIEW: Naytronix - Mister Divine

Raquel Dalarossa

There’s something inherently a little sad about solo projects. They are, by definition, the manifestation of the search for something more—something outside of, or perhaps simply more appropriate than, our regular avenues. Even when these ventures come out triumphant, they still often betray a sense of yearning, dissatisfaction, or restlessness. In Nate Brenner’s latest solo release under the Naytronix moniker, these sentiments are not just intimated; they are broadcast incessantly.

Mister Divine is the sophomore full-length for Naytronix, described as the result of a long, exhausting, and surreal tour alongside Merrill Garbus for tUnE-yArDs. Brenner, who joined the yArDs in 2009 and has since co-written much of the project’s material, originally touted Naytronix as his “dream funk outfit,” but the nine tracks on Divine see the bass player expanding to a more ambient, electronically-inclined sound. The opening title track, from its very first moments, establishes a pensive and very measured mood, as far removed from funk as one could imagine. Instead, the song comes off as chillwave with a soft spot for jazz—it’s down-tempo but melodic, electronic but speckled with smooth saxophone, flute, and guitar. Brenner’s auto-tuned vocals even bring Ernest Greene to mind.

Other tracks, namely “Starting Over” and “Shadow,” are infused with more of a stomping groove and Latin-leaning percussion, which might not feel too out of place on a tUnE-yArDs record. But even these more danceable numbers carry the unrelenting feeling of discontent and self-doubt—the beats are anxious, almost paranoid in some cases, and many of the songs feature some experimentation in the form of abrupt breaks and changes in the rhythms and textures.

Brenner’s lyrics and tone, all the while, are overtly, unequivocally despondent. There’s a stream-of-consciousness element to his soft speak-sing which gives the impression that he’s mostly talking to himself when he confides thoughts like “Stepped out on my own / But I never had the courage to fall” (“Mister Divine”), or “Things you think would last forever / Then you wake up and they’re gone” (“The Wall”).  “Dream” is potentially his most melancholy track, in which he says, “Tell my mother I miss home,” “Dreams will turn to nightmares,” and then closes the song with a withdrawn repetition of the words “What do I do?” The album is absolutely steeped in disappointment, self-deprecation, and uneasiness.

But these feelings are offset (to some extent, at least) by the confidence that shines through in the construction of the songs themselves. The instrumentation is layered with an ear for nuance and precision, achieving a warm and full sound at every turn.  Amid his personal grapples and doubts, Mister Divine also puts Nate Brenner’s talent on full display, and thus ends up feeling accomplished. It seems to gently remind us that at the end of every existential crisis is, thankfully, a glimmer of hope.