Dean Blunt is heartbroken, possibly. The Redeemer is his break-up album, a relatively straightforward affair after numerous releases that seemed to reveal as little about him as possible-- or maybe they revealed everything. His prior work, both on his own and with sometime partner Inga Copeland, varied wildly in quality, finally reaching a dead end with last year's The Narcissist II, a half-assed tribute to half-assedness. Where do you go from there? For Blunt, the answer is to lose the dopey feel of his prior records, strip away the layers of fuzz, and etch out a set of short ballads that form something resembling a relationship crisis album. There are occasional diversions-- distraught voicemail messages, clocks chiming ominously-- but much of The Redeemer assimilates the feel of someone slumped over a bar, reading the last rites on a romance.
The most interesting thing this album does is pose a few questions about substance and how it's ascribed. Does Dean Blunt now come with added "weight" due to sad horn solos, sweeping strings, and the sound of hands running up and down harp strings? No, not really. Often it sounds like someone keenly aware of the trappings of music that reads as "heartbroken," and how to manipulate them. At least it occasionally seems like there's genuine hurt there, sometimes from a twist in Blunt's voice, or a passage of particularly weepy piano playing. But most of the songs are half-formed and barely able to gain any momentum, strangled by track lengths that clock in around the one- or two-minute mark. There's a strong sense of something as transient as the Narcissist material, just dressed up in different clothing.
Fortunately, The Redeemer isn't just an elongated comment on how heavily certain devices have been leaned on throughout music history. On a song like "Demon", tellingly one of the longest here, Blunt ties together vocal manipulations, sound collage, pounding drums, and even a softly tooting trumpet solo. It finds room to bridge between Blunt's prior inclinations for haze and the roomier ones he works in here. His work as an arranger is often skilled, even if the end result either can't or won't get beyond feeling like a simple exercise. "All Dogs Go to Heaven" is his attempt at a Histoire de Melody Nelson cut; "Make It Official" briefly dips into woozy David Sylvian territory. Even Inga Copeland, possibly the person cast as Blunt's subject matter, surfaces on the title track, although her appearance lacks any dramatic élan. The Redeemer is too cynical an enterprise for that, always stopping short of actually feeling very much.
There is some worth in giving common musical tropes a kicking, although Blunt's approach-- essentially swilling the dregs of balladry around in his mouth and spewing them out-- too often ends up more flaccid than the style he's referencing. The Redeemer ends up somewhere between sarcasm and sensitivity, but can't dig deep enough in either direction to provide something that's worth returning to. The fragmented nature of the tracks, where ideas are set in motion and just trail off into insubstantial thought, can't get to the genesis of what makes material like this work. Pop that comments on pop needs to have a thorough understanding of the form in order to function. As a consequence, it doesn't really matter whether this is Blunt making a genuine attempt at recording a break-up album or using it as a framework to illustrate how vacuous such a gesture can be. Whatever he was looking for, he hasn't found it here.
