Equipment Pointed Ankh songs rattle on like a Rube Goldberg contraption, where silver balls click along on rollers, winding around curves and setting off complicated chain reactions. You can watch them for hours, marveling at the intricacy and precision, and there is something lighthearted about them. Reviewing their last album, from earlier this year, I wrote, “Charming like a wind-up toy, but with some dangerous edges, the tune explores chaos in a framework of tight discipline, wild blots of brass bursting through the tick-tocky measures.” Downtown! sports similar puzzle-palace intricacies but dips more towards pleasure, less towards discipline. It is, perhaps, Equipment Pointed Ankh’s pop album, a giddy, heady joy.
Consider the single, “Trucks to Gettysburg,” a bouncy, toy keyboard bop that sounds like incidental music for an art cartoon. It interconnects boxy, banged out keyboard rhythms hemmed in by the hard boundaries of drums. A wind instrument winds through it. Wild swipes of string sounds careen across the space. There’s a psychedelic hum in the background—organ, synthesizer, something like that—that has the effect of knitting it all together. You have this mushroom-y feeling of everything relating to everything else, including you the listener, and of sounds that you could reach out and poke with your fingertip.
Or take “Uptown,” which begins in a lavish flourish of Soviet propaganda orchestration, a blare of trumpets so stylized that it satirizes itself on the fly. From that springs a factory-line assembly of artful blurts and guitar squalls, of piano motifs and flute-y flourishes. It’s all bounded by tactile blots of bass, so that no matter how many sounds fly out the sides, the whole thing holds together. It’s like clockwork from Salvador Dali’s melting clock, as precise and regular as a figment of your imagination can be.
The previous album, Inside the House, was a pleasure, too, but an austere one. It took some effort to hear the tune inside the contraption. But Downtown! is pure joy, pure enveloping synchronicity, that builds elaborate sonic systems and places you at their ecstatic center.
