Typically, a good-but-not-great debut gets critically retrofitted as "promising," but I'm not so sure that's apt for Maps' 2007 Mercury Prize-nominated We Can Create. It was certainly an auspicious beginning for leader James Chapman: I could go on trying to nail down what his electronically composed, beat-minded UK singer-songwriter format seeks to accomplish, but I'll just leave it at this: I've heard no less than three of his songs at a Banana Republic or someplace similar. But right away, his limitations were readily apparent, and they were not the kind that typically improve with age. There was little evidence that he might expand the range of his whispered wheeze and use lyrics for something more than placeholders, write another melody as intuitive as the slam-dunk hook on "To the Sky", or create an arrangement as swoony as that of "Lost My Soul".
Turning the Mind doesn't build on those successes so much as offer a sort of fake-out. It's a more aerodynamically composed album than We Can Create, though there's still plenty of shoegazy gravy for your earbuds to sop up. Hooked up to headphones, you can hear how the intro of "I Dream of Crystal" manages to evoke the bookends of M83's discography, combining the icy funk guitars of "Couleurs" with the saturated synth buzz of Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts. On the other hand, the most immediate hooks on Turning the Mind come from a Saturdays=Youth rip so baldfaced ("Everything Is Shattering"), you figure that it was allowed to slide only because the two are on the same label. Elsewhere, Turning feels more distinctly European than its predecessor-- Chapman and producer Tim Holmes (Death in Vegas) embrace prevalent influences like French touch and Kraftwerk, but elsewhere they skew too glowsticky. "Let Go of the Fear" (not to be confused with We Can Create's "Don't Fear") is an embarrassing piece of Matrix-inspired cyberpunk dystopianism, while "Love Will Come" feels like little more than a five-minute vehicle for a two-second Faux-kenfold vocal trigger.
Whether or not Turning the Mind is a more personal work than We Can Create is debatable, but Chapman certainly invests himself more in the lyrics. He's said that the album was inspired by the therapy school of Mindfulness, but what you'll mostly notice is how much it seems to be about drugs. As is the usual case when people decide to start writing about drugs, there are plenty of awkward baby steps here-- I don't think I have to explain why the title of "Chemeleon" isn't a typo. The Vaseline-smeared "Valium in the Sunshine" comes off like a soft-focus ad for its titular subject ("You make me feel good/ Just like I should"), while the robo-Teutonic narrator of "Let Go of the Fear" mutters about "A cocaine fury/ Mother's little helper." But more pointedly, lead single "I Dream of Crystal" shows how far Chapman has to go as a storyteller-- in the first verse, he's an invested observer of an abusive relationship ("But please don't hurt her, man/ Because I'll hit you as hard as I can/ But that ain't really the plan"), and next he's the defensive addict on the receiving end ("You can't knock what you've never done... so get the fuck off my case"). And then... he repeats, "You can't change this state of mind," for nearly three minutes over a swollen foundation of synths, the lack of resolution coming off more like lazy songwriting than intentional ambiguity.
If anything has carried over from We Can Create, it's Chapman's use of repetition-- the kind you lose your place in, not so much the kind you can get lost in. Over the span of its six minutes, the title track morphs from a hushed salutation to a multitracked maze of harmonies and ringing chords, but it doesn't build so much as blur, its direction preordained. "Die Happy, Die Smiling" has a juddering rhythm that shakes you out of the second half's generally slumberous arrangements, but its format is almost identical to the penultimate track from the last album as well-- two dodgy lines repeated over and over again ("It hurts my soul to know you're crying," rhymes with the title), but with little else to incur the pulverizing force of "Don't Fear"'s saturated lead lines and joyous handclaps.
Perhaps unintentionally, Turning the Mind feels chemical itself-- it's a cheap buzz that ultimately should have no problem finding its way into the wheelhouse of people who just can't get enough whooshy sound effects. But as Chapman tries to be therapeutic from the psychologist's couch instead of the mixing board, this shift on Turning puts him behind not just nu-gaze all-stars like M83 and the Big Pink, but also role players like Telefon Tel Aviv and Ulrich Schnauss. Then again, that might not be such a bad thing-- as Axl Rose's actions proved, you never know who's listening to this stuff.
