In Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno, the actress and performance artist used costumes and chintzy set pieces to explain how insects have sex. The series, which debuted in 2008, consists of short videos wherein Rossellini does things like dress up in a praying mantis costume and talk about how, when the male mantis mates with a female, the female mantis will bite its head off. In another clip, titled “Whale,” she explains the difficulties of reproducing when you live mostly underwater and are the world’s largest mammal. Watching Rosselini hop around in little costumes explaining the bird and the bees is endearing and goofy, but it also has more profound effects. It evokes a sense of childlike wonder, reminding us that learning is a lifelong process and can open the world beyond our day-to-day quotidian drudgery. Erin Birgy assumes a similar vantage point on her excellent sixth album as Mega Bog, Life, and Another. It is a record that is whimsical and sensual; weird and romantic.
Over the past decade, Birgy has written from the perspective of aliens, animals, and three-eyed humanoids. The sonic texture of her music behaves like these strange creatures. As a composer and arranger, there’s room for improvisation in her music, but it all feels purposeful and intricate. Her work is loaded with playful juxtapositions. She writes arrangements that are jazz-oriented, but not jazz. She writes pop songs if you consider Stereolab to be a pop group. She makes punk music if you are the kind of person who moshes to the Lounge Lizards. Her work is slinky and decadent, like a vintage mink stole draped over a fainting couch. It’s roughly of the same cerebral terroir as Cate Le Bon or Meg Remy’s project as U.S. Girls. Life, and Another is compositionally dense without feeling overwritten or pretentious. Birgy’s music is joyful. Her delivery is that of some kind of palm reader who has been around the metaphorical block of life a few times.
Life, and Another exists in a terrestrial zone. The record takes place on Earth, if Earth were slightly freaked. These songs are an approximation of reality, imbued with magical elements: purple desert stones, dogs hovering atop glittering nimbus clouds. On the smokey “Butterfly,” blasts of guitar, saxophone, and pristine flickers of keys flutter like wings in the sky at night, turning purple to dark blue. The opening “Flower” sprawls out like a lone sunbather in the middle of the desert. Here, guitars courtesy of band members Will Segerstrom and Meg Duffy are sun-soaked, and the percussion of James Krivchenia and Andrew Dorsett clips away softly and stoically. Birgy’s voice sounds relaxed, and you can tell she is having fun: “You think you’re funny,” she sing-speaks like she has a big grin on her face “I don’t get it!”
As a lyricist, Birgy doesn’t take herself too seriously, but she’s not unserious either. She’s a very evocative and very funny writer, and her songs are marked by poignant, perfect little images. On “Obsidian Lizard,” she muses about a tiny blue lizard, a girl named Mallory, and a mystical entity by the name of Debbie Dubai. Her words come in like snippets of conversations, she favors the dreamy, mercurial, and poetic. “The big cat rips at the meat between the worlds,” she sings as if she were gazing into a crystal ball. The quartz-like “Before a Black Tea,” shares lineage with the kind of jazz-oriented pop of a band like the Rotary Connection or Burt Bacharach. It sounds rooted in the ’60s without feeling overinvested in sounding at all retro or being any kind of pastiche of the past. There are blips of free jazz, and warm-toned percussion. Birgy sings about bumping beetles into jars as a guitar solo brightens the sky; somewhere in the background, someone mimics the meow of a cat and the call of a bird. Listening to her music can feel like a trip to an all-night diner where the cockroach you see on the way to the bathroom would very much like to tell you its life story.
What is really excellent about Birgy’s work is her emotional registry. “Maybe You Died,” is the record’s starkest and most somber moment. On it, visions of Coach leather bags, chewing gum, coffee stains, and bad dreams are enough to conjure the sensation of soured feelings and puffy red eyes. But it’s the end of the song that feels the most painful. When Birgy sings the line “He didn’t die for me/Or anybody,” I thought about the absurdity of what it means to literally be dead. How often is it that you sit down and listen to a weird pop record with saxophones on it, and leave thinking about how bizarre it is to not exist anymore, at least not in the physical form while also being reminded at the same time of how wonderful it can be to be alive? There is tension present in how she communicates the basic functions of living and breathing and moving through the world. She’s funny and messy and writes like the dreamiest kid on the playground and also the wisest old man. It’s kind of like in those Rossellini videos: Birgy makes it seem like even the tiniest protean critter is a marvelous sight to behold.
Buy: Rough Trade
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