Downtown is a place in a perpetual state of becoming. Even if it’s falling apart as it is in many post-industrial American cities or redeveloping as with my home in Phoenix, downtown never ceases to be a place of opportunity and excitement. Majical Cloudz, the musical project of Devon Welsh and Matthew Otto, submits to getting lost in this constantly evolving place on “Downtown” (from their 2015 release, Are You Alone?) through the lens of a fragile and blissful relationship that could derail at any moment.
Everything about this song—from the use of a few basic chord progressions to the straightforward delivery of the vocals to the steady presence of a minimal drum beat—is simple, except perhaps the feelings that it elicits. It opens with an unassuming yet beautiful reverb-drenched synth melody that floats on a synth alternating between two chords before a steady drum machine comes in to guide the song. Welsh delivers the opening line, “Nothing you say will ever be wrong ‘cause it just feels right to be in your arms,” in such a calculated way that, despite the romance implicit in it, I am left feeling uneasy. The way the instruments float in the background while his voice cuts clearly through the center establishes a sense of intimacy in the track. Moreover, this almost feigned intimacy is so characteristic of our experiences downtown where at once we are both an individual within and subsumed by the whole of downtown.
As the chorus begins, an added synth pad and shaker expand this space which Welsh fills with cheeky rhetorical questions which seem to be directed at himself: “Is it really this fun when you’re on my mind? Is it really this cool to be in your life?” It's here that we first get a clear glimpse of the singer’s skeptical outlook on the relationship he describes. Contrasted with the first lines of the chorus which exude a sense of carelessness and a desire to get lost ("We’re going Downtown ‘cause we feel like running around"), these questions push us to consider the extent to which we can believe what he is saying.
In the second verse, Welsh expresses his desire and love through a more obsessive yet seemingly self-conscious lens as he sings, “If there’s one thing I’ll do if it ever goes wrong, I’ll write you into all of my songs.” It's almost as if he's planning for a tragedy and the inevitable change that is soon to come. The second half of the verse emphasizes this feeling of futility and nakedness by fading out the melodic motif—the song’s opening synth melody that I mentioned earlier—in order to isolate Welsh’s voice as he sings, “If suddenly I die, I hope they will say that he was obsessed and it was ok.” This line is the central moment of self-realization and acceptance about the feelings of uncertainty and insecurity that are produced through our constantly changing relationships and life circumstances. When thinking about Welsh’s epiphany in relation to how we produce downtown as a place built purely for opportunity, we question whether this fantasy might be too good to be true.
We can feel Welsh's sincerity as the song builds upon the fresh foundation of this barren, lucid moment with a reaffirming second chorus that reintroduces both the motif and the previous synth pad, along with newly added shimmering chimes reminiscent of the chorus in Joy Division's “Atmosphere.” The song concludes with a poignant bridge in which a defined synth emphasizes Welsh’s proclamation that “I’m going crazy, crazy for you.” It's here that Welsh's previous clairvoyance is fulfilled as he completely gives into his own insanity, and in turn, into the volatility of downtown’s perpetual state of becoming.
Majical Cloudz willingly accepts the uncertainty and the trials that come with being in any relationship by presenting them alongside the constantly evolving, complex imagination of downtown. But despite all of the volatility Welsh is navigating, to me the conclusion is clear: it really is this fun when you are on his mind, and it really is this cool to be in your life.
During Thanksgiving I found myself going through old boxes of adolescent artifacts, tucked deep in the corner of my closet, piled up and kept. Upon taking one out and seeing what was inside, I was immediately filled by the vapors of misplaced memories: a journal from 8th grade, burnt CDs, and some photographs from high school football games, taken with distant friends. Each memory meant something, but as a whole, the box of things became a vessel in and of itself. It became an entity of it's own through an amalgamation of various potent, yet certainly composite rediscovered things; a collage.
Many of the most poignant songs by The Books share a feeling of age and memory, packed into a song. Like my box, they're composed as an eclectic mix of suggestions tethered together. This is due to songwriting that reverberates with a halcyon air: of distant memories, preserved as they were—as an artifact of memory. These songs hold the capacity to trigger the consciousness to a certain place and time. The Books are masters of incorporating, syncopating, and pasting together "found sound" into a piece that becomes something entirely new, the resulting music becoming an elevated vestibule of memory and sound that functions independently of their scattered parts.
"There Is No There" by The Books is a perfect melding of found sound and songwriting. It begins with individual electronic notes bouncing off of original guitar samples. This elaborate and clean introduction to the song quickly breaks into a dated monologue by Albert Einstein on the topic of Gandhi:
I believe that Gandhi's views were the most enlightened of all the political men of our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit. Not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.
The fuzzy recording of Einstein's voice placed within the meticulously recorded samples might seem jarring and uncomfortable, but it's not; "There Is No There" functions as a whole, blending memory and music. Underlying this monologue, one can hear guitarist and singer Nick Zammuto's electronically tuned, ethereally enhanced voice consuming the sample of Einstein's voice into the song's entirety.
As the song progresses, Zammuto's multi-tracked vocals illuminate the space in between banjo and guitar notes before going back to a piercing and hyper-deliberate guitar style which creates all of the percussion needed in the song. This effect is achieved through their recording process: instead of sitting down and recording each instrument individually, they go a step further and record each note independently of each other, one by one. They then take the singular notes and paste them together creating what Zammuto calls a "collage."
What The Books create isn't merely musicianship with overdubbed voice clips; instead, the writing itself is structured and fundamentally predicated on the incredible deliberation behind each and every note placed in its perfect space. It's the found sounds that sampled by The Books that feel the most spontaneous. In an interview with Pitchfork, Mark Richardson asks, "Were you thinking at the time, 'I'm going to use these [found sounds] in a piece?'"
Zammuto responds by saying:
Not really, no. I think it's the same with Paul...we just have these things because we love them so much and it makes us happy to listen to them. The fact that they can fit into music is incidental. It's just so unpredictable how or if we'll later use a sample in music that, when you're looking for samples, it's important to just go for what moves you in one way or another.
Many of the vocal clips included in "There Is No There" suggest this incidental sampling aesthetic. The songwriting itself takes priority, then the pasting of field recordings can be tactfully included. Throughout their catalogue of music, these found sounds can range from old clips of their mothers speaking on tape, to Einstein wistfully speaking about Gandhi's cause—anything that "moves you in one way or another."
The Books manage to invoke a clean form of retrospection. Through their punctilious recording they invoke a pining in the listener, a yearning for sometime or some place, encapsulated in song. From a vast collection of their own field recordings and sound clips they're able to apply the last piece to their collage. Unfortunately, The Books are on hiatus, but what we do have is a perfectly packed box waiting to be opened.
A lot of people take indie rock tropes for granted these days. Deliberately out-of-tune performance, sloppy guitar playing, singing that’s more like a tuneful whisper—all these decades-old fixtures are either subsumed as meaningless signifiers of the dominant DIY aesthetic or derided as tired cliches.
I admit, when I first heard Izzy True, I was thoroughly in that second category. I was at a show in the back of a tiny record store in Kingston, NY, surrounded by two dozen pale bespectacled teenagers and mildly turned off by the lead singer’s self-effacing patter. But after giving Izzy True’s Troll EP a listen at home, I realized that she has a gift: an ability to transform tired tropes from inert genre markers into highly meaningful qualities that contribute to each song’s singular affect.
The EP has since become my favorite thing I’ve heard all year. I highly advise giving the whole thing a listen, but I’m going to zero in on track 2, “Cake”, which most fully embodies these attributes, in this case to portray an overwhelming sense of weeping insecurity.
Go ahead, give it a listen.
The track begins with a slow, languid drum groove punctuated painfully by a cowbell on the occasional upbeat. Izzy’s clean guitar, drenched in a depressive chorus, enters with a four-chord sequence with a descending melody. Already we have a pretty morose, though not lifeless, soundscape to work with.
Then the vocals enter, the singer’s mumbling only contributing to the mysteriousness of the lyrics. It’s hard to ascertain any sort of narrative, but I don’t think the lyrics’ effectiveness is dependent on the listener’s understanding in any literal sense. The verses, as per the song’s title, allude to cake-making, but obliquely: “Oh my sweet thing/Milky trembling,” Izzy sings in the first lines, whispering sweet nothings to her terrified virgin batter. In verse two, she flips an idiom on its head: “Grab a cold bowl/Greasy elbow,” she says, showing us that what we thought was admirable (elbow grease) actually might be pretty gross. The verses thus present an elusively foul sensuality that turns the literal sense of the song on its head.
This lyrical weirdness, when combined with Izzy’s careful melodic choices, contributes to a profound sense of instability. Although the verse introduces a steady pulse of 8th notes, the forward momentum they bring is tempered by the tentative vocal delivery, making the verse’s newfound energy more anxious than excited. Each verse is made up of two phrases of three lines each. The first two lines of each phrase rise, melodically speaking, forming what a music theorist might call an antecedent. Antecedents are associated with a sense of tension that is released with the consequent. The problem is that the consequent never really arrives. After the rising melody of the first two lines, we expect the third line to fall in turn, but it doesn’t. When Izzy sings “Here am I, still waiting,” the word “waiting” falls on the seventh degree of a major seventh chord. The major seventh chord is dissonant enough that even pre-1940 jazz musicians avoided it thoroughly, due to a distaste for the interval of a semitone between the seventh and the root of the chord. It is precisely this semitone that Izzy exploits here. She sings “waiting” a semitone below the expected root note, resulting in a melody that never truly resolves and feels marvelously unbalanced. If only she would rise to the root! But alas, we are left waiting forever.
To see what I mean, check out these examples: The first is an approximation of what we hear on the recording. The phrase ends shakily, on the major seventh of the final chord. Listen to the example here.
In the original, there is no release of tension traditionally associated with a consequent phrase.
Next is what we would hear if Izzy finished the phrase traditionally, on the tonic of the final chord. Here, the last note is one semitone higher than in the recording. Listen here.
With one small note change, tension is released in what sounds more like a traditional consequent phrase.
It's clear that in the second, hypothetical example, there is a sense of finality that the original recording lacks. It is this lack of finality that makes the verse sound so unstable.
This effect only intensifies in the chorus, which is arranged in a quiet-loud-quiet-loud form. “Dreamy dreamy dream,” she heaves, her pitch not quite fluctuating, her voice straining against itself in its low register. The guitar becomes more syncopated, increasing the anxious energy. “Beamy beam beam,” she pleads, and we hear the subtle genius that makes Izzy True’s music so damn effective. On the last “beam” her voice breaks free of the melodic trap she had set for it, rising and then falling a semitone, the same semitone used to such effect in the verse. What makes this particular instance so remarkable is that it sounds like an accident, hardly any different from the ordinary wavering in pitch that characterises her lachrymose delivery. We hardly notice it, making it all the more powerful.
We approach the loud part of the chorus, which solidifies the more forceful teary-eyed delivery suggested by the song’s previous sung whisper: “What’s a love machine?/I don’t have one, have one.” Izzy’s lack of a love machine is clearly traumatic, and we feel her pain as her deft imprecision combines with a vocal that, despite its strength, is carefully contained from breaking into a scream.
Of course, it’s not just these vocal subtleties that make this song so insecure. The guitar is often slightly out of tune, you can hear mistakes every so often, and the clean guitar tone, despite the chorus effect, feels painfully exposed. But it’s these elements in combination with her idiosyncratic vocals that give us this cohesive, tearfully anxious whole.
Next time I bake a cake, you will find my tears in the batter.
