If you’ve ever stayed up to an ungodly hour searching YouTube for the weirdest available Internet—like this masked man drinking a can of malt liquor during a hurricane—you’re likely to understand the music of Sean Schuster-Craig, alias Jib Kidder, a New York-based artist whose refracted pop music might soundtrack your next dive down a digital K-hole. Click through his Bandcamp, and you see that Schuster-Craig approaches music as cosmophage, chewing up his influences—Atlanta rap, Animal Collective, AM radio—into raw material for a blank canvas dripping with the excess of these ideas. His new album, Teaspoon to the Ocean, is his debut for Domino imprint Weird World, and represents a formal attempt to surface from the deep web into a small corner of the music world.
Teaspoon is an album in perpetual slide, an egg cracked on the pan and swished around. What I remembered most was the pulsing bass line on "World of Machines", which is bathed in pops and clicks like a field recording from the unconscious. On songs with some percussive momentum, like "Remove a Tooth" and "Dozens", there’s a wobbly element to his guitar tone that emulates the precarious feeling of riding a boat on shaky waters without trying to tip over. He sings like one of those text-to-speech processors, his cadence all cracked and warbled. The songs and ideas within lap over one another like the waves Schuster-Craig sings about on "The Waves", which is interrupted midway through by a saxophone solo that leaps out like the Kool-Aid Man bursting through a wall.
"I love all adhesives: the tidy boogers of rubber cement, the matte haze of Elmer's, the puffy fungus of Gorilla Glue," he told Dazed when asked about the importance of collage to his music. His songs are preoccupied with hazy, uncertain sentiments represented by phrases that sound like they’ve been assembled through one of those magnetic poetry kits you slap on your refrigerator. Aside from a handful of vocal spots from Julia Holter and contributions on electric piano from Zach Phillips, Teaspoon to the Ocean is a self-produced album—Schuster-Craig does it all on every track. The brightest moments sell him as an auteur with something to say; the worst make it sound like he's just dicking around.
The result is a little absent-minded, with the difference split between gleeful assertion and wanton noodling, the type of album that might sound best when you’re thinking about something else. This is partly by design, it seems; "I prefer art to assume the form of dreams," Schuster-Craig writes in his bio. "Dreams have their own rules, and I use these as rules of form." So is it criticism or compliment to say that, like most dreams, Teaspoon to the Ocean fades to a blurry impression? Elsewhere in that Dazed interview, he said he likes to work with ideas he doesn’t fully understand. "It's a kind of hunting, to try and force a world together and then find the most alive thing in it and capture it," he said. Consider this a sign post on the path toward some more fertile destination in the world he's created.
