If found-object art could make music, it would sound a lot like tUnE-yArDs. In her latest studio album, Merrill Garbus is still parading through the streets with a cacophony of drums and patchworked sounds amassed from a stockpile of inspiration. Bringing back her throaty, clarinet-like honks along with a melange of janky racket, Garbus fights cohesion in every second of the 13-track Nikki Nack. A boisterous lifeline of deeply throbbing drums, inspired by her trip to Haiti last year, supports this found-adventure sound and once again shows us what an expert collector of experiences she really is. Of course, just like any artist assembling a sculpture from others’ discarded junk, all this chaotic clamor somehow manages to collect itself in one cohesive wOrK oF aRt.
When Merrill Garbus set out to create Nikki Nack, she started with a lot of inspiration but not a lot to say. Immediately in the first track “Find a New Way” we can hear as she stumbles to place her fingers on a new approach. She questions herself and desperately attempts to heed her friend’s encouragement “I believed her, but in truth, if you’re convincing, I’ll believe anything.” This serves as a humble beginning to an album that’s more transparent than it suggests at first listen.
However, in the next track we can hear her move away from self-doubt and give way to instinct, echoing her experience learning the Yanvalu rhythm for the first time, “when I stopped trying so hard…I was able to sink-o into a ‘groove’” she writes in a Tallkhouse piece about her time in Haiti last june. “Water Fountain” stands as Garbus’ first rebuff against her aforementioned uncertainty, including it on the album even after noting the track sounded too much like a “kids’ song.” The first single, as light-hearted as it might sound, touches on the need for public services in neglected communities. A neighborhood stroll, in places even like Oakland, inspires Garbus to challenge provision levels for basic services in underserved areas.
Garbus ushers us even further into her self-assurance with “Real Thing” singing “I come from the land of shame” and “I look good in debt” which at first sound as though she’s exploring feelings of self-loathe, but quickly assert themselves as a tongue-in-cheek mocking of societal pressures to be a certain way. Screaming out patriotic clichés she urges us to realize the real thing is better than whatever new heights standards have climbed to. In “Look Around” she continues on a similar theme, but instead turns the mirror toward the audience warning us to “beware the empty promise all around me, all around you” and “let’s not pretend that the world around us isn’t falling.” These mocking undertones extend themselves to the oddest track on the album, “Why Do We Dine on the Tots?” The spoken-word query tells a tale of a grandmother’s not-so-modest proposal to eat children for dinner. The weird interlude finishes in true Jonathan Swift fashion when grandpa gives up his arguments against her and realizes children just might be the most appropriate fare for the occasion and are quite delicious too!
Woven in with some of the more heavily-themed songs on the album are lush, 90’s, R&B-inspired gems unlike we’ve heard from tUnE-yArDs before. In an effort to challenge herself artistically Garbus brought on a couple of well-known producers to provide input. Malay who has worked with Alicia Keys, Frank Ocean, Big Boi, and John Hill who is known for producing tracks for Santigold, Shakira, and M.I.A., both worked on the album, pushing her further out of her comfort zone. Letting go of her ego for the sake of musical growth proves a smart move with velvety smooth tracks like “Wait for a Minute” and “Left Behind.”
Nikki Nack proves to be another perfect example of what tUnE-yArDs does best – forging bits and pieces of sporadic vocalization and instrumentation into a single work of cohesion and unexpected consonance, then aligning it against a backbone of thunderous percussion. Inspiring those fervent, body-moving sounds is an equally passionate willingness driven by Garbus to not only bang against a boula drum, but to thrash with the same ferocity, against apathy and stagnation. It is with her one-of-a-kind enthusiasm for the continuous evolution of her perspective towards both music and society that she challenges our shortsightedness, urging us to dance not only to the beat of her drum, but to one all our own.
Rating: 4.5/5