Dense, informed, and academic, Misbegotten Man, the sophomore record by Brooklyn's People, is sort of the indie-rock equivalent of a senior thesis paper. And it's about that monotonous. The carefully scripted chaos of guitarist/vocalist Mary Halvorson and drummer Kevin Shea might be an excellent representation of accumulated knowledge, originality, and creative thinking, but listening to the album all the way through can be an exercise in patience more arduous than trying to read Jacques Derrida during an earthquake.
Album opener "Urban Fable # 1: The Accidental Ruin of a Romantic Populist" pretty much sets out the syllabus for the entire record. Halverson picks out slanted David Grubbs-style atonal guitar patterns and croons quavering melodies that expertly oscillate in and out of pitch. Meanwhile, Shea's technical yet schizoid drumming spills all over the song like an upended drawer of pots and pans, recalling his work as a member of wobbly non-free-jazz-pioneers Storm and Stress. The rest of the song finds the duo sprinting through a series sharp dynamic twists and turns, shifting from quietly warped melodies to spastic breakdowns every 30 seconds.
There's nothing wrong with some stumbling Raincoats meets Art Bears-style avant-weirdness, but every song on Misbegotten Man-- from "Biomimicry of the Social Body" to "The Phantasmagoric Energetics of Our 4-Legged Forbears"-- is cut from this same ragged cloth. Each shambling composition squats around the same tempo and follows a similar predictably unpredictable structure. After a few songs, Shea's ADD drumming even loses its punch, as one clattering syncopation becomes indiscernible from the next.
The lyrics are where People come off at their most textbook-driven and tedious. "And genetic cues rebut proximal answers/ Despite the partisan dialects inscribed on our DNA," sings Halverson on "Eyeball Balls Reporting Faster than the Speed of Sounds". Generally penned by Shea, People's words are harder to decipher than a page from Marlon Brando's diary at the turn of the 1980s. It's difficult to put a verse like "Fixed entropy on the surface bolsters nationalism like a frozen fantasy" to even the most malleable music, and at their most laborious moments, People sound like an economics professor lecturing on top of a James "Blood" Ulmer record.
But you can't dismiss People just because they're weird. The duo's quirks give them a unique and mischievous identity that's more interesting than, say, your average group of eyeliner-sporting three-chord lookers. After a few listens you may even find yourself empathizing with People in their plight as intellectual musicians operating in a medium that usually thrives on, well, being kind of dumb. But you can fault People for being a bit of a one-trick pony, serving up one consciously sloppy and oblique art ballad after another.
