tUne-yArDs – W H O K I L L

I’ve been stressing for weeks about how best to review this record, about how to translate its magic into sentences which even approach doing it justice. Ultimately, I’m just going to have to resign myself to the fact that no amount of drinking, thinking, redrafting or plagiarism is going to allow my review to faithfully articulate the enveloping presence of Merril Garbus (better known as tUnE-yArDs) on her second album WHOKILL. In the face of her music, my prose style is doomed to find itself lagging miles behind her ambition, her talent, her expression.

tUnE-yArDs - W H O K I L L

Put simply: this album is overwhelmingly dazzling, truly something else. It’s the sort of record where you just want to burn it onto a whole pack of CD-Rs, get out on the streets, thrusting it into people’s hands saying “just fucking listen to this”. It’s the sort of record where, on the rare occasions where you force yourself to listen to something else for a while out of a gloomy sense of obligation, everything sounds so yesterday and shit. Why bother listening to anything else?

My first instinct was to write this whole review based solely around the opening track (a writer could very easily splurge five hundred words or so on any one of these tracks alone), leaving you nine gloriously unspoiled tracks to go away and explore for yourself. Because these are songs which make me feel like I’m ‘spoiling’ them for you by talking about them. Each of these tracks is positively saturated with left-field surprises, sideways moves, dives down alleyways, one-off flourishes, and jaw dropping turns of musicianship – leaving you reeling on first listen, and spellbound on the fifteenth.

Let’s look at that opening track: beginning with a energising rhythm of rolling floor toms, Merril uses her trusty loop pedal (the core component of her musical set-up) to layer up breathy, overlapping ‘oh-ah’ noises – one of the album’s countless examples of staggeringly complex arrangements seeming wholly effortless. Just six seconds in, and she’s got us eating out of her hand. From there (and this is all in just track one, remember) we get a breakdown of competing saxophones, some rapping, some falsetto, propulsive Latino beats, aggressive electronics, and a coda which brings them all together in a melee of overwhelming power. Tracks two to ten: repeat and develop.

With most albums, a review will latch onto it’s greatest strength and make this the basis of its analysis – whether that be the lyricism, the vocalist’s performance, the songwriting prowess, or whatever. WHOKILL doesn’t have an identifiable greatest strength. Every aspect of the record which you might conceivably comment on – its scope, its production, its execution, its whatever the fuck you care to mention – are all of a towering standard, and conflate to create something beyond the sum of its parts.

Take the single ‘Bizness’ as an example of everything this album is capable of: its a display of virtuosic musical ability, it doubles as an early-Summer windows-down singalong, it’s a vocal performance to die for, it’s a colourful expression of inventive production techniques, it’s anything and everything you can ask for from a three minute piece of popular music. Whenever one aspect of the music might threaten to engulf another, everything maintains posture within the mix. By rights, Merril should be smothered by the sudden punkrock explposion of choppy powerchords in ‘Riotriot’, but instead she soars above the abrasion with ease (man, she can sing, by the way). On paper, the massive hooks of ‘Gangsta’ should distract from the nuances of its arrangement, but the textural richness of the piece still enraptures.

This is an unstoppable record; a record which seems like it can do anything. Merril is one of those rare artists where ability, ambition and invention are all in perfect alignment, urging each other onwards, rather than stifling or outstripping one other. I’m struggling to avoid using even more hackneyed cliches or making even more wildly outlandish endorsements by this point (please, allow me one more quick throwaway observation before I sign off: the teenie tiny rap breakdown in ‘Killa’, with its uber-funky bassline, is so cool), but sometimes they’re absolutely warranted, so here we go: if there’s a better record than WHOKILL released this year, I’ll be truly astounded.

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