The experimental Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter ARTHUR once explained that while he often sets out to write songs that sound like the Beach Boys or Gram Parsons, “they end up sounding like Daniel Johnston if he was a cyborg.” His music delights in pulling the rug out from underneath you, so that cheery, bittersweet tunes like “Simple Song” turn on jarring lyrics like “All I know, and all that’s clear to me/Is that everything ends, and everyone leaves.” Time and again, his sunny pop melodies prove to be a Trojan Horse for his brain-warping sonic experiments and existential angst.
Hair of the Dog arrives roughly 18 months after ARTHUR’s debut, Woof Woof, and as the title would suggest, the new record very much picks up where the last left off: it has the same mixture of whimsical, jangling guitars, eerie lyrics, and stomach-drop production maneuvers. But Shea has become more ambitious. The expansive, chaotic “Feel Good” recalls the stretched-elastic percussion of SOPHIE, and the cascading, cavernous beats of “Something Sweet” suit Bronx rapper Caleb Giles’ understated verse. The scrappy psychedelic funk of “Epic” and “I Don’t Want To Talk To You” recall Steve Lacy’s melancholic lo-fi songwriting.
Sometimes, these ideas end too abruptly—as with the too-brief, shimmering “Fatalist”—or are expressed too bluntly. The heavy-handed lyrics of “Biz,” which take aim at the superficiality of the music industry (“Your manager says that you look great/With dollar signs written on your face”), feel at odds with the gentle surrealism of something like “No Tengo,” Shea’s best song to date, which does much more work with oddly touching, evocative images like “I can't help but feel small when she kisses my head.”
Shea’s music seems to exist in multiple genres and time periods at once, and his lyrics frequently evoke a kind of purgatory. Despite his sing-song, carefree style, the protagonist of Shea’s songs seems to be perpetually trapped, whether that’s “inside a jar of Formaldehyde” (“Something Sweet”), or waiting for someone to come home and save him from loneliness (“William Penn”). The latter song is buoyant even as it takes on a creepy dimension, threatening: “You can’t get away from me!” When ARTHUR nails these uneasy moments, the effect is like looking in a funhouse mirror: what you see is recognizable, yet somehow terrifying, and you can’t avert your eyes.
