James Ferraro’s latest album, NYC, Hell 3:00 AM, opens with 22 seconds of a text-to-speech app repeating the word “money” over and over in a synthesized woman’s voice that was probably engineered to sound neutral but, in this contex, sounds like the flattened affect of a person in the midst of a psychotic break. If, as its title strongly suggests, the record is meant to function as some sort of portrait of New York City, it gets off to an accurate start.
The picture that emerges from there on isn’t any more flattering. It may be Bloomberg’s shiny technotopian New York that Ferraro’s portraying, but he renders it in the grimy grey-on-grey palette of the city’s gutted-out Seventies, an eternal night time of dirty concrete and menacing shadows like something out of an Abel Ferrara movie. Ferraro’s one of the leading figures in a successful movement to establish for contemporary R&B the same kind of avant-garde movement that other pop styles like rock and rap have had for years. The movement’s most popular member is the Weeknd, and although Ferraro’s past work has been more aggressively experimental, and boasted a heavier house music influence, they were at least in the same general orbit together. NYC, Hell 3:00 AM feels like he’s slipped from that orbit completely and crash landed face down in a gutter.
It’s a bleak album that totally inverts the druggy nocturnal glamour that’s become avant-R&B’s default mode. While it faithfully recreates the feeling of being chemically imbalanced late at night, it’s not the fun kind. The compositions are harshly minimalist, skeletal assemblages of beats that feel like half the drums are missing, distended keyboard parts fading in and out like something in a fever dream, and overblown field recordings of police scanners and traffic noise, just in case your anxiety wasn’t already elevated enough already. It’s not the fashionable, tastefully arranged kind of minimalism that’s currently de rigueur with tastemaking electronic musicians, but rather something sickly and enervated, like the songs once had more parts and a more robust sound but have somehow been starved down to their current states.
The tracks tend towards abstraction, and at a few points the album seems to lose any sort interest in rhythm and melody, relying instead on mood and texture alone. Other times they’ll cohere into something that’s more or less identifiable as an R&B song (“Close Ups” and “Cheek Bones", which sound glamorous but aren’t), and even then the bare sketches of melody take a back seat to establishing a smoggy atmosphere. The whole thing feels like it’s coated in a layer of greasy, digitally simulated dirt. Here and there Ferraro adds his own vocals, mumbled beyond comprehensibility, always a little off-key and sleep-deprived, and touched with just enough modulation effects to sound like the recording’s physically warped.
If NYC, Hell 3:00 AM sounds like an unpleasant listen, that’s because, on some levels, it is. Ferraro has some of a noise musician’s combatively challenging nature, and at times seems to be going out of his way to unsettle his listeners. (Sometimes a little too far, like when he tries to evoke the psychic stress of living in the city by literally sampling 9/11 news broadcasts.) The thing is that much of it this unpleasantness just adds to the fascination. It helps the record succeed as a verite-tinged portrait of life in New York City, or at least one aspect of it that doesn’t often make it into movies these days. It also helps it to create another type of portrait, one of the most vividly true to life depictions of serious depression that’s ever been recorded. Stripping R&B of its ability to inspire pleasure turns out to be the perfect pop music metaphor for the crippling anhedonia that’s part and parcel of the severe depressive experience—a sensual form with its sensuality drained away, transformed into something ugly and oppressive.
The fact that Ferraro’s able to work in an R&B medium using ugliness as his primary aesthetic says a lot about how real the style’s avant garde is, and about how far they’re willing to push things. It also says a lot about how good things can get if they keep pushing. NYC, Hell 3:00 AM isn’t going to be your thing if you’re on the hunt for the next edgy crooner about to blow up—you’re only going to hear it in DJ sets if the DJ is extremely brave or suicidal or both. But if what you’re looking for is an experience, one that can offer something extremely rare and powerful, if not exactly fun, then this is it.
