(Liv).e - 'Couldn't Wait To Tell You...'

By Phillipe Roberts

The name of this game is misdirection. Forget the crafty intro, where, soothed by celestial organ sounds and bantering with herself, she appears to crack open a clear “love story” for you. Forget the frantic suggestion of the title. Forget the rough edges of her previous solo output, the foggy lo-fi layers of reverb that clouded her bewitching vocals. One album into what’s shaping up to be a groundbreaking career, (Liv).e pulls off a stunning magic act on Couldn’t Wait To Tell You…, welcoming you into a psychedelic hall of mirrors where emotional states and sonic vignettes warp and distort in the blink of an ear. With unwavering confidence, she slowly paints a romantic map and dances through the brushstrokes. 

(Liv).e comes at you fast. For all the sticky humidity of her vocal hooks, the Texas singer has too much to say to keep any one idea in play for more than two minutes. Apart from album centerpiece “I Been Livin”, which traps her ghostly serenade within an icy piano sample cold enough to slow her thoughts to a near four minute trickle, and the bed-creaking bounce of “Stories with Aunt Liv”, you’ll have to keep your ears ready, thumbs locked and loaded to bookmark your favorite memories for later. But even when the floodgates burst open completely on the frantic “Bout These Pipedreams,” her portraits (“Gentle brown skin, soft as sugar / Bittersweet life like a cocoa bean / Dark eyes that eat the past”) come through clear as day, keeping pace with the surge of an unhinged hi-hat, all clocking in at a hardore punk minute-and-a-half. 

At every point and speed on the record, she flexes a lyrical cleverness and poised playfulness, matching the fantastic arsenal of beats at her disposal (all due respect to producers mejiwahn, Daoud, and Shungu for the pillow-soft landing zone for her vocal talents) while maintaining a poised playfulness. She plays up a big sigh for laughs on “Lessons from My Mistakes...but I Lost Your Number”’s false-ending gag. She floats against the clobbering beat to devastating effect (“How many portals will you jump through for my attention?” is one hell of a wake-up call) on the sobering “You’re Wasted Let’s Go Home”. She balances between “making room for myself” and giving herself over to one last one night stand on “How She Stay Conflicted...I Hope She Understands”. (Liv).e portrays her emotional fluidity with a winking, lucid clarity that’s positively infectious.

If anything, it’s that total lack of emotional defensiveness, this commitment to breathing life into the reflective pauses of romance, that makes Couldn’t Wait to Tell You... one of the most psychedelic listening experiences of the year. Just try to listen to (Liv).e gently curve through a lyric like “I've got a brand new crush today” or “Placed a bet with myself that you'd come and find me” and not melt into a puddle of your own well-earned goofy bliss. 

Way back in March, (Liv).e opened a livestream by saying “my name is (Liv).e and you’re under quarantine with me”; having experienced the sublime relaxation of this album, I sorely wish I’d been in the know back then. Praise has been rightfully heaped on Couldn’t Wait to Tell You... for its journal-entry candidness. As someone for whom journal-keeping is a daily act of quiet resilience, it’s impossible to listen to this album, with its fragmented urgency and dreamy wistfulness, and not feel seen with a blinding spotlight. But no record in recent memory carries this feeling, this purposeful urgency to knock you off of your bullshit, with so much self-affirming joy. A blizzard of thoughts, feelings, dreams, and ideas worth venturing out into, Couldn’t Wait to Tell You... plays mind games that only leave you smiling.

REVIEW: Jon Bap - Yesterday's Homily

Phillipe Roberts

Yesterday’s Homily, the latest from soul-infused experimentalist Jon Bap, begins almost imperceptibly: a high-pitched drone, sounding like half-filled wine glasses played in reverse, hovers in, hanging overhead in stasis like a U.F.O. The sci-fi whine builds to a peak before suddenly shape shifting into a radio jingle. “Hey you, what are you doing today? / This is your life story.” For the next 43 minutes, Bap takes the listener on a tour of his mental airwaves, sifting through channels of cerebral future funk, delicate lo-fi balladry, free jazz soundscapes, and weird hip-hop. At times, the barrage of styles can feel alien in its methodology, but Bap’s steady hand on the dial and his highly expressive melodic voice filter out the noise to a (mostly) soothing hush. Be warned: your neck may snap from the sudden shock of his incessant genre-hopping, but Yesterday’s Homily swings with a fragile, unvarnished humanity that cuts through its chaotic musical clutter.

“Today, with Vigor,” the first “proper” tune on the album, functions as a drum kit warm-up, both for the audience and, as the exasperated, glitched-out “fuck” at the end suggests, Bap himself. The playing on the record is all his, but percussion is the primary prism through which Bap draws Yesterday’s Homily into existence—and it shows. The record is dense with fluttering rhythms in a constant state of flux, battling the encroaching confusion of saxophones, guitars, bass, and voice memo samples. The array of styles at his disposal is staggering. “Today, with Vigor” sees him flailing furiously against the kind of prog-rock noodling that might crop up as a sample on an MF Doom release. A chopped-up funk strut powers “My House” into the top spot for the album’s most danceable moment, while a dizzying flourish of hi-hats gives “My Machine (Digs a Hole)” its wavy, neo-soul backbone.

As dazzling as these feats of percussive ingenuity might be, the way he presents them lends the album much of its organic feel. Whether sloshing up against odd-metered lo-fi samples or careening to a halt as a take goes off the rails, Bap’s playing doesn’t so much hem in those wackier elements within restrictive structures as provide a homing beacon to eventually guide him back to Earth. His samples—the grains of reality that he allows to seep into this extra-dimensional world he’s created—perform a similar function. “Voice Memo from 2013,” a clattering of percussive chimes with a soulful groaning underneath, is entirely one fuzzy recording until “_Stuck_” loops it into skeletal disco. And the soft ballad “Come Back Home” sounds all the more devastating as a cell phone-quality recording, its electric guitar strums de-tuning and deforming before they have a chance to harden against pretty post-production.

These wrinkles, and a smirking sense of humor (we see you, “Free Trap Etudes”), lend Yesterday’s Homily a relaxed, sentimental mood that becomes its greatest asset. “This wouldn’t all exist without empty space,” a disembodied voice muses at the end of the record, and it’s a truism that carries weight for the album in question. Because the empty spaces—the vantage points of reality from which Jon Bap carefully considers his sermon on love, fear, and anxiety—are what make Yesterday’s Homily work. It’s a rush to hear such a bright voice consider so many ideas, but a treasure to see them combed over so thoroughly.