Obviously not... But I don't think that's the end of the story either. While "boomer" stuff has certainly seen its stock fall hard, artists are still routinely praised by mainstream publications for "problematizing" and "deconstructing" established artistic forms. But, when you actually listen to a lot of what receives this kind of praise, it's just standard pop or R'nB that borrows drum patterns and vocal filters from the existing catalog of Björk, D'angelo, Laurie Anderson, Janet Jackson, Sparks, or similarly inclined pioneers of sound. This is instead of attempting to find their own voice by radically changing the conversation as their predecessors had. I find it not just derivative, but sloppy too.
Now it's natural for trendsetters to become less revolutionary sounding with time and for innovations to become the standard-bearers as they become routinely adopted. But for the rejection of the old to have any kind of meaning, it should be accompanied by the emergence of something just as provocative. And what I'm seeing instead is a borrowing from the past to make the blasé present appear less grey and plain porage flavored while simultaneously rejecting the strangeness of that past, almost as a way of burying the fact that no one has any fresh ideas. It's a funny game people are playing now. Amusing on its surface but mighty disturbing to unpack.
I'm, of course, thinking these meandering thoughts while pondering whether I'm just too old to properly appreciate music anymore. Suppose I've reached the point where all contemporary music just sounds the same... but if that were true, then by do I find Noah Deemer's The Sleepwalker so revitalizing. It's not like anything else I can point to right now and it coheres together in exciting ways. What works for this album, and why I connect with it over many other contemporary pop records, is that it defies the structure of a pop record while offering something catchy and whimsically chaotic. It's also a record that I feel I can immerse myself in fully and locate accommodating geometry amongst all of the outlandish and unorthodox forms- spaces that I didn't expect that I could fit myself into and yet find myself drifting quite comfortably.
The song structures have a kind of Stephin Merritt's tough-in-cheek quality to them, rucked and carried by a singing style that is half ludicrous and half lugubrious, with cooing tones that unfurl lyrics like a long roll of parchment paper. Noah's words, tumbling out of his mouth like marbles out of a cloth bag with a hole in it, careless but conscientious, they allow you to follow his trail through the overgrowth. Each line shimmers with a dark glare and is characterized by an as deeply wanting and pervasive sense of deprivation. A lacking that emanates from the core of his personage and a fundamental longing for illusive paradigms of purpose and justice- a constitution that is very much in line with, but not derivative of, Leonard Cohen's highly visual poetry.
The production is veritably hazy with a sharp, steely quality under its soft leather upholstery, with strands of metallic slag curling up through the stitching to catch your skin and deliver a startling puncture. The guitar tones rotate between scuffed shades of gold and silver, combining lopsided melodies and hoop-clearing leaps of charred-circuit synths to achieve heterodox acrobatics in a dim-florescent masquerade. Acid jazz grooves wear down calcified stratums to reveal pearls of dazzling guitars and nectar stirring glockenspiel that flow upwards like a mountainous geyser of psychedelic splendor. It's like a used-future Wonderland. A clandestine oasis in the sandy expense and drifts of Arrakis- with all of the eminence of a mirage and the weight and depth of a cruise liner.
As imaginative as The Sleepwalker is, it doesn't ever feel like you are stuck inside your own head, or a prisoner of Noah's, or anyone's, ego. Instead, the album is like an open door, a way of exiting the confining daydream nightmare trap of nostalgic cycles that consume the world and a measured stride towards some terrain yet unexplored. There is no wrong point to enter and no inappropriate point of egress. It is a true detour from the ordinary, one that will hopefully fill your mind with memetic souvenirs and recharge your own zeal for creative exploration. It is a deconstructed blueprint to help you reconstruct a world of decaying shadows. That's the point it helped me reach, at least. And I've hardly felt more awake after the encounter.
