The British experimental rock group Adult Jazz has no problem cramming their music with ideas and lofty goals. In interviews describing their 2014 debut Gist Is, they name dropped Hermann Hesse, criticized religious institutions, and said that the album tackled everything from morality to empathy and the efficacy of communication itself. NPR even followed suit when reviewing the record, saying it was concerned with “the search for meaning in life.” Two years later they’ve released their sophomore follow-up, *Earrings Off! *a record that equally embraces the same theory-laden attitude. *Earrings Off! *is meant to analyze the complexities of gender and the body’s changing place in society. In descriptions of the album, the band has stressed the record’s interest in “the possibility of authenticity” in a society that rewards normative behavior.
It’s all very interesting to read about what an album is supposed to do, and there is precedent for the political thrust of a piece of music to affect the conversation it’s entering, but these intentions can so often backfire. (PJ Harvey’s *The Hope Six Demolition Project *being a case study for this fine line). The cleverness and unique playfulness of Adult Jazz's debut Gist Is helped steer it away from the cliff of self-indulgence and pretension. *Earrings Off! *edges much closer to that drop-off than its predecessor, burdened by often-silly lyrics and a sound that is a bit more derivative than their last record would suggest.
What still remains uniquely rewarding about Adult Jazz’s music is the construction of their sound. They use a trombone, cello, processed vocals, and a menagerie of sample to tread the line between acidic minimalism and bubbly exuberance in confoundingly expert ways. Of this album’s seven songs, three of them (“(Cry for Time Off,)” “(Cry for Coherence),” and “(Cry for Home)”) are short sonic sketches, serving as the most interesting moments in the otherwise slow pace of *Earrings Off!’s *24 minutes. These three songs mostly focus on single sounds—a helium-cracked vocal cry, dissonant string loops, and the bated breath of a brass instrument. These pared-down constructions generate more and more detail on repeated listens. The album’s four other songs attempt to mimic this but come off as overwrought and heavy handed at best.
The difficult six minutes of “Pumped From Above” exploits corrosive horn sounds and maddeningly uneven drumming for all their worth. It could almost sound like a facsimile of a Peter Brötzman composition, but the arrangement of the chaotic noises can be curiously predictable. The singing is usually so swaddled by the noises that Harry Burgess’ words are obscured, but when you look at what he’s saying on paper it can make the experience even more cringe-inducing. Take this passage: “God cannot be softening/He beats strong with iron wings/Kneeling sporty chest pumping/Before the Alpha-lord.” You can open up any book of poems by Hart Crane or Dylan Thomas and find a similar impenetrability. But these words and images have the feeling of being selected at random; their difficulty doesn't have a sense of clarity or deeper meaning and incomprehensibility isn't the same as seriousness.
This is a running thread through the album that detracts from where Earrings Off! improves upon their debut. They’ve learned how to create hooks without sacrificing from their outre sounds. This is best accomplished in the title track (which pleasantly confirms any of the Dirty Projectors comparisons) and “Eggshell.” But even the pleasure of craft can melt away when you figure out amidst the textures these words are ringing out: “And if he's 1940's/He whistles through a meadow.” It makes it impossible for the album to actually engage with the conversation it proposes, and often made me wish I could ignore the words and allow the singing to be another instrument. *Earrings Off! *is filled with these sorts of growing pains, ones that hopefully point to brighter pastures sometime soon for this promising band.
