Mahjongg's third full-length, The Long Shadow of the Paper Tiger, is a more collaborative affair than their earlier work-- although without studiously poring over the liner notes, you may not notice. Almost every track here is labeled as having some sort of guest spot, though the identities of those guests are obscured, both in how they're credited and how they sound in the context of these songs. Many are from the band's hometown of Chicago, including Bobby ("Robert" here) Conn and Jeanine O'Toole from the 1900s, but nearly all of the guest vocals are heavily manipulated until they're indistinguishable from the rest of the band's strange sonic soup.
As disjointed as that sounds on paper, The Long Shadow is the band's most focused and cohesive work. That's partly because it maintains a consistent mood, and partly because it maintains a danceable, frenetic pulse. At seven tracks, it's their leanest full-length; each song proves the band has stayed as omnivorous as ever-- still borrowing from post-punk, afropop, contemporary R&B. Choosing highlights is almost as challenging as picking out the guest spots: nearly all tracks build from thin but complex drum machine beats and synth tones that range between muffled, tinny, and abrasive. "Miami Knights" stands out with its big, slow stabs of synthesized strings and even bigger bass hits, while "Grooverider Free" is a densely packed epic that earns every minute of its nine-plus runtime, masterfully ebbing and flowing in tempo and intensity.
But as the keyboards chirp and the drum machines knock, a rambling spoken word interlude on "Grooverider Free" promises a "new world order," the lyrics of "Wardance" threaten "no more water" and "10 million dead" over a cheerfully relentless beat, and an ominously slowed-down sample that punctuates the heaving half-time rhythm of "DeVry" helpfully reminds listeners that we're all gonna die. The Long Shadow is in the same production style the band has been refining for a while, and it fits this record in particular. It's easy to imagine a song like "Wardance" as the sound of a poorer, war-torn, and more globalized future; these songs implore listeners to dance as much as they act as sirens alerting them to duck and cover. This style works for and against them. The lyrics, when you can make them out, amplify the paranoia already present in the music.
Still these sounds sustain the entire album. The Long Shadow of the Paper Tiger makes the trade off from stunning peaks and occasional deep valleys of their previous albums for overall consistency, and just being able to make that trade is a big step for the band. It's hard to find a dance party as distinctive as the one Mahjongg are throwing here, and The Long Shadow is one step closer toward the band's solidifying its own identity, even as it invites so many others into the fold. The only disappointment is the missed opportunity for them to be as provocative as they are danceable.
