Rudi Zygadlo is a funny one. The Glaswegian vocalist and multi-instrumentalist's second album Tragicomedies is a maze of confusion, contradiction, and epiphany. Don't get me wrong, it's good-- vastly superior to his 2010 debut effort, Great Western Laymen-- yet it requires a patient ear, because to fully engage is to embrace the aural equivalent of a carpet being pulled out from underneath you over and over again. Not any old carpet, but the most ornate, antique Persian rug: Tragicomedies twists and turns luxuriously and theatrically, shredding skins in a looping cycle that runs the gamut of emotion from poignancy to parody.
There are moments of great beauty and befuddling disconnection, often within the same song. Lead single "Melpomene" is the key to the album's peculiar appeal: A spirit-lifting classical piano recital that swells like a wave at high tide suddenly drops to a vocal break that smacks of disappointment. The change of pace and timbre disturbs, but then a breeze whips down and we're off again, lifted above and away in an ivory spiral. Once the dust from the jarring juxtaposition settles, it makes sense: The song is more beautiful because of that moment of discomfort. Our emotions don't do seamless segueing, Zygadlo seems to be saying, so why should melody-- music's most persuasive narrator-- submit to unnatural, neutered neatness? He signals as such with the title. Melpomene is one of Greek mythology's greatest muses, most commonly associated with tragedy, but her roots lie with watching over melody.
Zygadlo takes many melodic risks on Tragicomedies but doesn't always come up trumps. "Black Rhino" is the album's bull in the china shop, a clumsy interlude that feels more than a little naive. "Waltz for Daphnis" sounds like a a barbershop quartet crashing a tea dance, in a teeth-grindingly awkward way. That said, the hits far outweigh the misses. "Russian Dolls" is a densely layered elastic pop song, veering off course enough to beguile yet snapping back seductively into shape at the last possible second. In stark contrast, "The Domino Quivers" is a brooding, bittersweet number that pushes his dubstep beginnings to experimental folk territory, and it's all the better for it. "Persephone" is music box pin-perfect. "The Deaf School" has a digital funk edge and includes perhaps my favorite modern xylophone bridge, so delicately pretty yet potent enough imbue the rest of the song with its energy. It's those few transient, transformative seconds that we hang on for.
In fact, a deeply transformative, intrinsically tragicomic moment hangs at the heart of the album. An accident in Berlin, in which Zygadlo fell through a window and was found by a stranger, which would be slapstick if it wasn't so nearly tragic, is the subject of "Tragicomedy". "You saved my life/ How embarrassing/ You saved my life/ How mortifying," he sings, then a moment later: "A bloody window/ A broken human." The song's regret springs from his failure, in the chaotic moment, to thank his stranger-savior. And yet he seems aware of the humor in the situation, the ridiculousness of it. That sense of the ludicrousness of life runs throughout Tragicomedies. It's what gives it its spark and forgives its slip-ups. What remains, however, is his boldness, and his attempt to stretch, successfully for the most part, mainstream ideas of melody.
