Certain political travesties of the last few months have promoted a hands-over-ears response from even the most optimistic citizens, with logic drowned out by alternative facts and social media bloviations. Suddenly it feels much more difficult just to be in the world, which is the animating idea behind the third album by the Brooklyn collective Landlady. The World Is a Loud Place is one of those works of art that was made in one era but released in another, darker one. It’s an album that perhaps wasn’t intended to be political, but in 2017 it’s inescapably politicized. Frontman and chief songwriter Adam Schatz isn’t trying to topple regimes or even speak truth to errant power; rather, he’s just trying to evoke the sensation of being in a human body at this point in time.
“Feel your heart beat once, there it goes again,” Schatz sings on “Electric Abdomen,” the album’s opener, as though the continuity of consciousness was a surprise. The song itself spools out in zig zags, changing direction and tempo abruptly and without warning. From their previous record to this one, the band have mastered a kind of lenticular prog-pop, defined by busybody arrangements and winding structures that form a fitting musical approximation of that .gif album cover: always in motion, always jumping from one idea to the next. “Rest in Place” snakes around into a big brass fanfare, although it fades out before you can discern the motive: Is it triumphant or cautionary? Do those horns constitute a happy ending or is the killer still alive, ready to pounce at us once more?
Schatz presides over these songs with a mischievous glint in his eye—half wiseacre Virgil leading us through a new American hellscape, part grinning Cheshire Cat sitting in inscrutable judgment. His lyrics recall the fragmented domestic scenery of recent Wilco tunes: trapped in first person, always trying to make sense of another person. “Teach me how you’re organized,” he sings on “Cadaver,” and it sounds like the most existential pick-up line imaginable. “Just be happy with the guts that we’ve got” is his warped version of a kitten-poster platitude. It’s a harsh world, but certainly not unpleasant to visit, thanks to Schatz’s gnomic charisma.
Has anyone ever enunciated the word “California” with as much loopy precision as he does on “Driving in California”? Schatz savors every consonant and vowel, then tosses the word out the car window with a distracted “-yeah.” The song is almost purposefully annoying, like a parody of tour songs or Golden State paeans: “Driving in Californ-yeah makes me forget everywhere that’s not Californ-yeah.” Then Schatz moves eastward, first to Colorado and then to Niagara, picking up in cleverness along the way. It’s the only track on The World Is a Loud Place where Schatz’s lyrics are superficially sensical, where the lyrical conceit is too unwieldy for him and the agile band to handle.
The album is best when it’s most vexing, when its puzzle-piece arrangements demand you put everything together. Part of the fun is following the circuitous routes these compositions take and hearing the oddball flourishes Landlady insert into the arrangements. Landlady craft a cacophony, but Schatz won’t put his hands over his ears: There’s some beauty in the noise that’s worth going deaf to hear.
