Mike Gordon’s mangled mix of pop, rock, and soul sounds like it’s made of scrap metal and polished with sandpaper. Across Two Star & the Dream Police, his magnificent debut album as Mk.gee, the 26-year-old from New Jersey subverts recognizable forms—’80s R&B ballads, Phil Collins-inspired downtempo anthems, Michael Jackson-meets-Arthur Russell pop-rock grooves—with unusual tones, tempos, and textures. His distinctive, distended guitar playing and Prince-indebted singing are pinholed through murky, twitchy mixes that refuse to stay still. Despite the elusive and exploratory nature of his music, Gordon is a master of melody, chiseling gorgeous, richly detailed pop songs from seemingly cluttered compositions. Two Star is as singular as it is familiar, an original and expansive record that feels at once timeless and uncannily contemporary.
Although Gordon’s been releasing EPs and mixtapes since 2017, even landing a track on Frank Ocean’s Blonded Radio, many people first encountered him in 2021 as Dijon’s wiry, wild-haired guitarist. In a live performance of Dijon’s debut album, Absolutely, the pair play off one another in conspiratorial glee, Dijon in his olive fishing vest and Gordon with his ’60s-issue Fender Jaguar, both bounding about a gear-strewn dining room with childlike awe, howling and harmonizing and clapping until they can hardly stand up straight. Before Dijon met Gordon, the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter’s brand of guitar-backed R&B was charming but safe, a collection of Blonde-lite songs that didn’t always extend past emulation. Gordon, however, offered Dijon a new rhythmic architecture, and freedom, to channel his gifts. “The real spirit of the record came when I formally met Mike,” Dijon recalled in a 2022 interview. Absolutely marked a significant leap for Dijon’s music, and he credited Gordon as an invaluable catalyst. “I think he might be creating or transmitting from an alien planet,” Dijon said in another interview. “It feels like this is the first music I’ve ever made.”
Dijon appears to have helped Gordon make a similar leap of his own. Before Two Star, Mk.gee’s solo releases sounded like an offshoot of Toro y Moi or Unknown Mortal Orchestra, a pleasant array of sunny side-chained guitars, syncopated drums, and funky basslines. Two Star, though, signals a sea change for Gordon, who abandons easily deciphered mixes and clean song structures for strange, defiant choices that blister with anxiety and longing. Warbly electric guitar, spiraling saxophones, distorted synths, and two-bit toms splinter and scatter; Gordon’s raspy voice sounds as if he were in the next room, singing from a seated position on the floor. This is perhaps Dijon’s most obvious influence; before Two Star, Mk.gee was a tepid vocalist, but here he belts, coos, and moans with soulful, skin-tingling skill. And though the album has no obvious narrative, the oblique songwriting doesn’t detract from Gordon’s raging emotions. He’s desperate to be seen and to see, to stop hiding from the hard stuff and give himself to someone or something else, to embody a sense of self that feels safe and sustainable, at least for a little while.
Aside from its obvious influences—Prince, D’Angelo, the Police—Two Star’s closest contemporary analogues are Jai Paul’s Bait Ones and Bon Iver’s 22, A Million. Like both, Two Star rejects crispness and clarity in favor of manipulation and obfuscation. If “Are You Looking Up?” had been recorded more conventionally, it could well be a hit. Instead, nylon strings scrape against the mix’s ceiling, the drums a two-dimensional pock beneath the clipped bass, the sound of crunching metal curdling in the background. Yet Gordon’s feral, pitch-shifted singing practically dares you not to join in. “If you want to go then baby go wide,” he cries, sounding as if he’s performing from the side of a highway. The lyrics, though opaque, balloon with feeling, the ingenuity of the form capturing something indelible about its content: Gordon aspires to arrive at an amorphous truth, to lay himself bare without sparkle or shine, seeking “a miracle to cut me slack.”
Even “Candy,” a jam remnant of Scritti Politti and Chaka Khan, roils with weirdness. The wormy, highly processed guitar twiddles about in a manic staccato, tangling with a slippery synth pad and gated snare. It appears to be about entertaining your darkest urges—“I’ve done some bad, I won’t fake it/I got patterns, don’t think I’ll shake it”—but the music is all glitz and funk, a contrast that gives Gordon’s mischievousness a satisfying edge. The slow jams are delightfully disjointed, too, like “Rylee & I,” whose lead riff sounds like a guitar being chewed up and swallowed, or “You got it,” where droning hiss and synth shrieks flesh out an otherwise plaintive ballad. These potentially jarring choices don’t scan as off-putting, because Gordon’s a meticulous craftsman; what might be alienating or clunky in another artist’s hands here feels revelatory and just right, every decision an intuitive effort to get to the core of a feeling. If anything, Gordon’s experimentation only makes him sound more human, the messy elements in his music communicating something truer than cleanness ever could.
No song better illustrates Mk.gee’s gifts than “How many miles.” On its face, it’s a slow-footed R&B track about self-realization, with a downtrodden Gordon muttering, “I thought that I lost me/After all this time, I couldn’t remember me.” But look closer, and the complexity of its construction reveals itself—a fizzy guitar lick melting into a filtered vocal chop, a rising string synth blossoming into a swell of twinkling lights. Gordon’s lissome guitar playing and mesmeric singing are so plainly moving that it’s hard not to wish the song had been around sooner so that it could’ve been a companion during different life phases, offering a suffusion of hope and warmth when you needed it most. That’s the magic of Two Star & the Dream Police: Nothing in contemporary music sounds quite like it, yet it seems to have always been with us, hovering just outside the realm of possibility.
