Amen Dunes’ music is persuasive, but it’s not always clear what it’s trying to persuade you of. Since the release of his confrontationally noisy debut album, DIA, 15 years ago, Damon McMahon has continually refined the remit of his sound—shaving away the haze, juicing the elements drawn from pop and classic rock—but kept the narratives relatively oblique. Listening to his last album, 2018’s Freedom, felt a little like trying to read a Great American Novel by holding it up to a reflecting pool: ideas about loss and familial ties cut through, even if entire sentences were tough to string together. It was a personal record, but rarely a clarifying one; you got the sense that McMahon would rather keep his lyrics obscure than boil down his ideas into something digestible.
The ideas on Death Jokes, his self-produced sixth album, are clearer. He is blunter and more forceful with specific meaning on this album than ever. Broadly, it is an apocalypse tale, in which humanity’s final moments on Earth are plagued by the same ills that have stalked us for centuries: hatred, greed, puritanism. Misunderstanding is a recurring theme, as is loneliness, specifically the kind that arises when the state fails to take care of its citizens. For all this pessimism, though, McMahon’s take on life, which he returns to again and again on Death Jokes, is simple and optimistic: “Some day we lose it/So use it.”
These ideas are filtered through warped hip-hop and rave beats, although the peculiarities of McMahon’s phrasing and melodies—his music is always surging or undulating, rarely taking a streamlined route—mean that Death Jokes sounds quintessentially Amen Dunes. Whether bleating over a sputtering 909 on the Lil Peep-inspired “Rugby Child” or singing an electro-reggae lullaby on “Purple Land,” McMahon is at a point in his career where he could never be mistaken for anyone else, and although Death Jokes is filled with odd details, like the minimal techno interlude “Predator” or the garbled lo-fi samples at the end of “Boys,” the muscular melodic lines that emerged on Freedom and 2014’s Love still come through.
That connection with the rest of McMahon’s music is welcome, because Death Jokes can be hard to parse, and would seem hammily provocative in the wrong light. It opens with a sample of a Lenny Bruce joke, and on the stunning, nine-minute penultimate track “Round the World,” essentially the final song before a track made entirely of samples, he sings about kids “getting stoned/On their phones/They’re so lonely and don’t know why.” But McMahon never seems like he’s tut-tutting or finger-wagging so much as appealing for forgiveness and generosity. On “Mary Anne,” a pastoral country ballad addressed to one of the women who sexually abused him as a child, he sounds compassionate (“In Purgatory, we both got lost/When we meet again, we will catch up love”) but terse (“I know you say who we are is the same/Well we aren’t the same.”) Other songs, like “Boys” and “Rugby Child,” are portraits of violent people driven by forces they can’t fully control. It doesn’t feel like McMahon is exalting victimhood, or condemning some vague concept of “cancel culture,” as much as trying to find shades of gray in an increasingly black-and-white world.
He says as much on “Round the World,” a fraying epic that blooms from resolute pessimism about society’s failings into a song that’s maybe not hopeful, but at least helpful. Its lyrics—about greedy strivers and curious old friends and mystical piano geniuses—feel like they were written by an old-timer parked at the pub, offering their stories to anyone willing to listen. And as anyone who’s had their ears chewed by an old-timer at the pub knows, there’s generally a kernel of wisdom nestled among the cantankerousness. On “Round the World,” it’s a simple maxim for living out the end of your days: “Here’s to keeping it old fashioned/You can skip your next life/When it’s all gone, you’re gonna wish you had some old fashioned around.” Put it on your tombstone—wouldn’t that be a laugh?
