I have never put on a record because I wanted to think of the Siege of Vienna. I have never closed my eyes and thought of Kahlenberg, the mountain, and known that the Ottomans were closing in. I have never put on a record because I wanted to think of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw. I don’t know why anyone puts on a record. I do know that music often sounds really good when you are in love, and that is a good reason to put on a record. Also, music often sounds really good when you are sad and when you are grieving, and that is a really good reason to put on a record. On his second album, For Every Set of Eyes, J. Mamana considers the Siege of Vienna. He also considers grief. It is a frustrating and beautiful record.
Mamana’s music appeals to a bookish set. It asks that you maybe already like Mahler and Bartók. It implies that you might subscribe to the literary journal n+1, where you will find an ad for Mamana’s album in the pages of the newest issue. (Perhaps you will have already read his n+1 essay from last year, about the Ethiopian composer Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru.) It is tricky to be so expressly referential in music without being a snore. Mamana’s “It’s Bastille Day,” which is about Bastille Day, includes a particularly jarring François Hollande name-check that doesn’t quite pay off. And For Every Set of Eyes isn’t exactly an easy listen. It demands that you focus and pay attention to how everything swirls together. Somehow, he more or less pulls it off.
As was clear from his last record, Nothing New in the West, Mamana is most comfortable writing extraordinarily high-concept songs, some of which are indebted to Beethoven. But his work is also very much in conversation with baroque indie pop composers Koenig and Longstreth. Unlike Longstreth, who wrote a sexy pop song about goblins, or Koenig, who wrote one about eating falafel, Mamana is entrenched in the baroque. He writes impenetrable music that is both deeply rooted in Kabbalah and also about fast food. In “New America,” he sets the Magi and Belshazzar near a Wendy’s. It is kind of like a Van Dyke Parks song, ridiculously ornate, exactly what you would want to hear while riding a cartoon stick horse through Camelot.
You might be tempted to write off opener “Genius or Apostle” as vaudeville, pure Sondheim with its melodrama, its sweeping strings, its operatic vocals, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. Mamana encourages and delights in these provocations. Watch this! the song demands in its final two minutes, as Mamana shifts from grandiosity into something absolutely twisted. Its pyrotechnics become a laser light show. It becomes a scenario where you are trying to tell a joke while on acid and just trying to grip onto the floor. You are scared. The strings are compressed, they become electrified, electronic. It’s so weird and twisted you can’t look away. And it is glorious in its commitment to being just that: weird. It ends with a choir.
This is what makes For Every Set of Eyes special and good almost in spite of itself. It is freak music and it is not self-conscious about it. It forgoes any ambition to be “cool.” The saxophones that split “Years of Lead” in two come at a point where Mamana talks about wanting to hold on to someone, tight. The eight-minute long “No Fun” is about death, broken up by Mamana saying “fuck” a bunch. The strings feel like you’re looking down from a bluff, or starring in the video for “Wuthering Heights.” All of the song’s sweeping gestures, its key changes and sudden collapses in form, are underpinned by grief. This is Mamana at his best: when his ambition matches this honesty. There’s a line in “Tenderness Lost,” weird and real and true, that encapsulates this perfectly: “Basic and basically alive,” he sings. In other words: real as fuck, beautiful, alone, painful.
