Merrill Garbus started recording music as tUnE-yArDs while working as a babysitter on Martha's Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts. Funny things happen to solitary people in quiet places. You talk to yourself. You expand to fit the space. You realize "you" might be more than one person. Midway through her 2009 debut, BiRd-BrAiNs, Garbus tells a deadbeat lover she no longer needs him because she can always get pregnant with birds, which comes as terrific news. Her backup singers—a bevy of voices that seem to have fluttered out of a 1930s dish-soap ad—agree, which makes sense because they are also Merrill Garbus.
Her music has always been playful but extremely confident. The product of a liberal liberal-arts education, she has worked as a puppeteer and is often photographed wearing facepaint. At the height of the Occupy movement, she lead audiences from the theater into the street, guerrilla-style, and her music embodies an activist's urgency, filled with sounds that elbow their way to the front in order to be heard. She's an introvert's nightmare, and all she wants is for you to open your heart and sing.
Her third album, Nikki Nack, is more reserved than 2011's w h o k i l l, which isn't saying much. There are still songs that sound like playgrounds full of street kids ricocheting off each other like bumper cars. There are still nursery rhymes about body dysmorphia and white liberal guilt set to what sounds like Coke-bottle percussion from the undiscovered country. But there are also songs like "Time of Dark" and "Look Around", where Garbus seems to have made a conscious choice to slow down, and in slowing down, lets us see the muscle in her stride. tUnE-yArDs now sound less like buskers outside the neighborhood co-op than some blues-jazz combo from the near-future, severed from the traditions of the music but still somehow in touch with its spirit. (Two of the songs here were produced by Malay, who also worked on Frank Ocean's Channel Orange, and whatever Garbus lacks in marketing appeal to the alt-R&B crowd she makes up for by actually having a powerful voice.)
Subtlety has never been at play for Garbus, who tends to tackle her subject matter like a child after a robotic mole at a carnival game. "I come from the land of slaves/ Let's go Redskins, let's go Braves!" she wails on "Real Thing". Her world is made up of broad irony and clashing patterns—one whose conflicts are obvious but painfully irresolvable. Earlier, on "Water Fountain", there's this vignette: "I saved up all my pennies and I gave them to this special guy/ When he had enough of them he bought himself a cherry pie/ He gave me a dollar, a blood-soaked dollar/ I cannot get the spot out but it's okay, it still works at the store." The imagery is violent but the delivery is sweet—then, you remember the cherry pie, red as blood. The most startling moment on w h o k i l l was when Garbus fantasized about making love to a cop who arrested her brother, then confesses how liberated she feels by violence as the band breaks into an ecstatic calypso.
Nate Brenner reprises his w h o k i l l role here as a bassist, synth player, and co-writer, and the album also features contributions from Roomful of Teeth, a Grammy-winning vocal group who, like Garbus, enjoy doing things with their voices that most people would not classify as singing. But even as Garbus opens up tUnE-yArDs to other collaborators, her albums still appear to be the work of a solitary kid in a basement, jerry-rigging her own fun with the help of imaginary friends. It is private music, splattered outward.
Like Dirty Projectors and St. Vincent, Garbus is an artist who lives with weird but flirts with normal. Gone is the chipper ukulele of w h o k i l l and BiRd-BrAiNs; Nikki Nack signifies maturity while still allowing room for Garbus to do zany things like scat-sing "One two three o'clock/ Four o'clock, walk and walk and talk and talk and walk and talk and then/ Five, six, seven—seven—seven—heaven—heaven—take me again" for 90 seconds straight on full tilt. In moments when Garbus does calm down, she does it with the grace and certainty of an archer drawing back her bow—less a concession than a show of power.
