Imagine someone at your otherwise-mundane party has dropped ecstasy; he's the only one there who has done so. Flushed, sweaty, intense, he stares everyone directly in the eyes and says things like "I see this light coming from behind and growing to enormous size. This is magic." Ignoring everyone's obvious discomfort, he presses on mercilessly: "Hey mister," he asks, locking eyes with you. "Don't you want to be right here?"
Devon Welsh sings these lines on Impersonator, his second album with synth programmer Matthew Otto under the name Majical Cloudz. And this role-- the Jehovah's Witness ringing your doorbell at 7 a.m. to save your life, the AA member interrupting your lunch hour to explain how his fear of being loved led him to key your Volkswagen last April-- is the role that Welsh plays on Impersonator. In his searingly direct live shows, which have often ended with Welsh standing in the crowd, basking in the communal emotional wellspring he's summoned, and on record, Welsh burns through surrounding obstacles in order make you feel what he is feeling. Impersonator is a gorgeous record-- extraordinarily sung, hypnotically focused-- but it is Welsh's sense of emotional urgency that makes it special. No-one else is likely to pin your ear back in quite the same way this year.
The foundation of the music is synth pop, though Welsh and Otto use it to construct glacially paced, small pieces of music with almost no harmonic motion. Most songs are made of three or fewer elements: "Childhood's End" has a four-note keyboard melody, two bare notes of synth string, one droning "ahhh" note, and a heartbeat-pulse click track. The air around each element is as palpable-- and as important to the track-- as the elements themselves. On the title track, some voices, looped and babbling, are the only sounds accompanying Welsh, apart from a hushed burst of church organ. There is a natural, inexorable feel to the repetition of these sounds; like clear water quarreling over smooth stones, they're an impersonal constant that situates Welsh's painfully personal performance somewhere larger than himself.
The simplicity of the sound also mirrors the purity and directness of Welsh's language. Here's his idea of an icebreaker: "Hey man, sooner or later you'll be dead." "I wanna feel like somebody's darling," he sings on "Impersonator". Welsh's are the carefully chosen words of someone whose life depends on getting his point across, and his lyrics often read, on paper, like self-help: "I feel the mood to love myself and I know I'm trying," he says on "Mister". But to someone dangling by a thread, self-help clichés take on a terrible significance, and Welsh's voice conveys the desperation of someone who has been tasked with believing in the simplest things again.
Welsh has said that, although he gravitated naturally towards the frontman role of whatever band he was in, he was never trained to sing. Listening to his expertly modulated phrasing, his long-breathed lines, and his rich, even tone on Impersonator, it's kind of hard to believe. (For his part, Welsh attributes his natural vocal command to the fact that his father is actor Kenneth Welsh, best known for playing "Twin Peaks"' Windom Earle.) There is a hint of Depeche Mode's David Gahan in the plummy edges of his voice, but Gahan's camp and hauteur are burned away; Gahan used those tools to establish distance, and Welsh's aim is to close it. He is startlingly flexible, capable of dipping to Calvin Johnson-basso profundo lows, but without Johnson's training-wheels wobbles. He can ascend effortlessly into a bell-clear head-voice that recalls the George Michael of "One More Try". His velvety, heated vocal take on "Turns Turns Turns", while not a pyrotechnic performance, remains one of the most nakedly beautiful pieces of singing I've heard this year, in any genre.
You can hear the idiosyncrasies of Welsh's self-training poke out of some of the album's odder edges. On "Childhood's End", the word "come," sung in an ascending melody, separates out so that it sounds like "come home." On the same song, he turns the word "me" into three words, each with a different vowel. These quirks work as part of Welsh's larger forceful disarmament strategy: “People that have written reviews of our shows have commented that, ‘Oh, he seemed nervous or he seemed uncomfortable on stage' … I tend to take that as a compliment," he said. "I never want to be the kind of performer that seems completely calm and collected on stage; I would rather … [be real] about the idea that when you get on stage it always feels new.” On "I Do Sing for You", Welsh reaches out to soothe a member of his own embarrassed audience: "You would laugh, but I'm on stage for you/ I do sing for you/ Of course I do, and I love to." There is very little you can do in the face of such an onslaught of loving kindness, so you surrender. Impersonator gently twists your arm like this, song-by-song and note-by-note, and it is as discomfiting as it is transcendent.
