Is it better to bury the lede or to climax early? That’s the question that hangs highest at the close of Milk Money, the first album in three years from solo multi-instrumentalist, one-man loop station and Andrew Bird drummer Martin Dosh. Dosh begins with six slight and impressionistic pieces, each stopping not only well short of the five-minute mark but of any real peak, too. “Golden Silver”, for instance, slow-fades from a cool-blooded thicket of sighing organs, twinkling pianos, and thudding drums, evacuating its own oxygen before any eruption can occur. “Death Set” is not nearly as dangerous or foreboding as its name implies, with wild runs on multiple keyboards and stepwise sequences of bass simply folding in and out of a jungle beat until that pulse is all that remains.
But the final track, “Legos (for Terry)”, is the most ambitious and most surprising moment of Dosh’s entire repertoire. Just shy of 25 minutes, “Legos” is not only longer than the sum of the rest of the album’s parts but also longer than anything else in his back catalog by more than double. This isn’t an exercise in simply going an indeterminate distance, though: Dosh wrote “Legos” as a commission for the Walker Arts Center in his homebase of Minneapolis, Minn., to be played as a duet with Glenn Kotche on the night of the Wilco drummer’s premiere of his John Luther Adams collaboration, Ilimaq. It’s a grand, arching composition that moves between two monolithic sections with just the right balance between restraint and restlessness.
Though Dosh has sold his own piano playing short in the past, he summons Keith Jarrett during the first span, scattering bursts and slipstreams of notes between refracted vocal samples and a chiffon layer of static. It’s a phosphorescent dawn. Dosh’s original take lasted nearly twice as long as the album version and featured no vocals, but the sampled-and-splintered utterances here help introduce the song’s second half, a crisscrossing wonder of kalimba and piano, hi-hat and synthesizers. Their melodies and rhythms shift in and around one another like a Steve Reich epic on vacation, exciting and electric. Dosh micromanages the elements as the piece progresses—steadily boosting the background hum, wildly stringing together the vocal bits, carefully digging into the beat a bit heavier and hotter. When all those components tumble around one another, with vocals crashing against drums against electronics, the feeling is ecstatic, as though the composer-performer has just stepped into a field of infinitely bright light.
The rest of Milk Money, or Side A, is simply fine. Dosh’s previous solo records, especially since 2006’s audacious The Lost Take, have been guest-heavy affairs, with songs stuffed by big beats and rock-like codas aided by unexpected influences. Perhaps saxophonist Mike Lewis lent his horn to a tune, or maybe Andrew Bird warbled a bit with his violin. They fit the eccentric, interconnected scheme of Anticon, the hip-hop miscreants who released almost all of Dosh’s material until now. But these pieces were all built without collaborators in mind, though Dosh did retroactively add vocals from a few singers, such as the slip-sliding, pitch-shifted bleat during “Unto Eternity” or the soft coos webbed throughout “We are the Worst”. Still, these shorts seem somewhat weightless and without anchor, serving more as messengers of a changing mood than as engrossing compositions. They’re the antithesis, then, of the record’s finale. These numbers remain interesting on a level of one-man-band proficiency, as when the rattling drums slingshot between the M83-like rumble and tropicália flute during the opener. But that’s something you notice from afar, not when the songs have pulled you into their orbit—something that, for the most part, doesn’t occur during Milk Money.
In an era of laptop beatmakers and producers able to conjure a full-band feeling from a few outputs and a mixer, the sounds that Dosh gets as a solo performer are not as novel as they once were, despite the workaday analog nature of how he gets them. Strangely, such a consideration has never been problematic for him before Milk Money, because the songs themselves moved with enough drama and dynamics to make the mechanics secondary to the material. But Milk Money can feel like a clinic, a demonstration of the possibilities of his prowess without any meaningful purpose for them. Of course, on Side B, Dosh reveals a clinic of exactly how this should be done, with categories and clichés cast aside in favor of a rigorous and thrilling composition. For Milk Money, it ultimately makes no difference whether the lede is buried (it is) or the climax comes first (there isn’t much of one); this uneven album is mostly a vehicle for “Legos (for Terry)”, an accomplishment that’s not only worth hearing but good enough to leave you hoping for more like it, too.
