Album Review: Amir Yaghmai - Go Bozo
I often find myself wondering, what is the point of an album? It's not as pessimistic of a question as it sounds. I obviously think albums are an important art form. But the fact that I believe they are important in no way lessons my curiosity about them. If anything, it makes them even more extraordinary. The best answer I can come up with as to why I think albums matter is that they allow a musician the space to explore many different sides of an idea, a sound, or a mood, all while enabling them to separate and organize their discrete and overlapping inquiries into manageable pieces as a cohesive statement. That's the best I can do. But even this explanation seems overly functional. The truest answer I have of what an album means as an art form is defined not by words, but by experience. You have to immerse yourself in it to know what it is and why it's worth appreciating. And I presume this is true for both the connoisseur (a name I would give to anyone who likes music) and the musician who makes what the listener enjoys. These thoughts are at the top of mind when I drop into Amir Yaghmai's debut album Go Bozo. It's not an album that he intended to make, but it is the album he ended up making regardless, and I find this lack of pretense intriguing and instructive. When the session guitarist and frequent Julian Casablancas collaborator was approached by Colorfield Records about making a record for them, he reportedly felt some need for pause. His career had been defined by taking direction from others and helping them achieve their artistic vision, but to make a record on his own was an anxious and intimidating proposition. He did it though. The record was made. Guided by intuition, Go Bozo is an uncommon variation and collision of '70s Continental disco, modern club beats, and progressive rock, whose boundaries are both clearly manifest and yet always on the verge of metamorphosis. Opener "Full Bozomode" exhibits a startling calm, like an electrical storm passing through a cloud nebular observed via telescope at a distance of millions of lightyears away. Not all of the tracks orbit a single, central groove, but when they do, like on "Bozo Beach," it can really drag you through some exotic places; like a Martian fashion runway encircled by an acidic bubble bath, a volleyball practice where the teams play with a wrecking ball in giant mecha suits over a net made of lazars, or the secret dojo of a cyborg partisan army training to engaging in hand-to-hand combat with interdimensional terrorists. The title track of Go Bozo has this woozy sort of sloshiness to it that handles like a homage to Ethiopian jazz that was decoded from scrambled and waterlogged VHS tapes, and the bemused and cluttered freak outing "Special Price for Geeks" melds what sounds like Spanish guitar playing with Grimes outtakes that have been remixed on one of those ancient modular synths that takes up an entire room. Go Bozo is highly imaginative and eclectic, but it is also somewhat naive. And that's one of its strengths. It doesn't have a clear destination. It was made with the understanding that the process is the goal, and the point of completion for the project is when all of its diverging tangents converge at a natural point of departure. In this instance, Go Bozo's centripetal climax is the final track, "Lamb & Tato" a resonating coda where we are exposed to Amir's unadorned and plaintive voice, reciting a lyrical poem in dialogue with a younger, more frantic conversant over a stark and submerged piano melody and a wash of careful violin interventions. It's personal and distant, funny and sober, and innocent in a tortured kind of way- you'd have to be a real bozo not to feel at least a little charmed and enlightened while listening to what Amir has to offer here.
