For all of ten seconds, Man Forever’s Play What They Want seems like it could be a nightmare. Led by drummer John Colpitts, the album’s first syncopated clonks briefly suggest an oncoming Santana-style superjam. But the panic subsides quickly with a rising drone, the arrival of an upright bass, and the familiar voices of Yo La Tengo in full dreamy splendor. Known as Kid Millions when he’s the propulsive force behind Brooklyn noise-rock heroes Oneida, Play What They Want is his richest and most accessible endeavor yet. Over just five songs, he works with percussion ensemble TIGUE and a full cast of avant-collaborators including Laurie Anderson to build vocal pieces that often land between dry DIY cool and the sung narratives of art music.
A frequent participant in the Boredoms’ multi-drummer extravaganzas, Colpitts’s earliest Man Forever incarnations explored Metal Machine Music-inspired overtones with four or more drummers on tuned kits. Another early voice-discovering iteration was an experiment in rigorous and monastic percussion drone—literally two drummers, one drum—as Colpitts and a partner faced off across a single snare. Since then, Colpitts has expanded the project’s vocabulary, including the simple-but-not-simple ensemble piece “Surface Patterns” and an album-length collaboration with So Percussion. But none approach the clarity and fullness of Play What They Want. While rhythm remains central, it’s rarely obvious that the music’s creator is mainly a drummer.
Sometimes recalling the more art-rock tendencies of Oneida’s earlier studio albums, the brightest and catchiest vocal moment of Play What You Want is positively Eno-esque. Written with Phil Manley of Trans Am, “Debt and Greed” pairs soaring multi-tracked vocals with Manley’s best Frippertronic guitar flourishes. The album-closing “Caternary Smile,” also made with Manley, is likewise a drummerly fantasia dotted with a few verses of proper song and—throughout the rest of the track—a drifting melody that seems to pull the drums along below it. Unlike Oneida, who thrive in a live setting, Play What They Want’s most thrilling moments are nearly pure studio creations.
Laurie Anderson, with whom Colpitts drums in the Symptoms, appears on the nearly ten-minute “Twin Torches.” Beginning with layers of celestial overdubbed vocals, the drums come crashing in, and it becomes the album’s only extended moment of Colpitts in his natural habitat, wailing and dancing behind a drum kit. As Anderson’s voice intones about the mysteries of “two handed stars,” the force at the center remains Colpitts, whose playing stays purposeful even when he’s drumming on the edge of tom-tom thunder.
”It’s more about melting into the whole and not ripping into solos,” Colpitts says in a 2012 instructional video for the Man Forever piece “Surface Patterns” designed for the pick-up crew of musicians accompanying him at various tour stops. Besides breaking down a heady piece of music, the video is also an evocation of a musical ideology of instrumental rigor informed by cosmic seriousness, music that might be meditative for musician and listener alike. Where that rigor has often been expressed in harsher and sometimes physically challenging forms (such as Oneida’s seven-hour sets), it is here accompanied more often by gentle vocals than cleansing blasts of guitar drone.
The album-opening “You Were Never Here” fades in on a bed of vocals from all three members of Yo La Tengo, sounding like a close neighbor to the far-out percussion spaces of the Hoboken band’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. But just as quickly, the song exits through a side door. Colpitts’ steady beats remain the only constant in a picaresque sequence of free piano, wordless vocals, and Mary Lattimore’s concert harp flourishes. Seeming as if it could leap off into an album-length suite of its own, it comes to a close after nearly nine minutes.
For many, it would qualify as a set-piece. For Colpitts, it is a fully realized part of a whole, both the album at large, but also a vast, rewarding, and still-evolving discography. Recording and performing for nearly 20 years with Oneida and spin-offs like People of the North, Colpitts’ drums have sometimes provided an almost melodic key to understanding the full-bore noise-blasts surrounding them. On *Play What They Want, *those melodies can be heard more directly than ever.
