J. Mamana is a young guy who has made a big record, full of vigor and oversized ideas that don’t quite fit him yet. After graduating from Brown University in 2016, he locked himself away—in the time-honored autodidact fashion—and emerged with the kind of elaborately footnoted baroque pop album that testifies to a lot of things—talent, vision, ambition, precocity. But above all, Nothing New in the West reflects a certain urgency of post-collegiate youth, when you have, at least for a brief moment, learned everything and need to share it all.
When asked who he is channeling, Mamana namedrops Bartók, Frank Ocean, and Beethoven—you know, everything. But for the rest of us, the most readily available reference points for Mamana’s debut album will be in the over-educated-singer-songwriter canon: Van Dyke Parks in the ’70s, Kevin Barnes and Joanna Newsom in the ’00s, the Dirty Projectors circa 2012’s Swing Lo Magellan. Randy Newman makes his way in here, too, particularly in the lyrics, which brim with references to faded glories and faux-folksy couplets like, “My old man was a doctor/His allegiance was to the blood.”
What he doesn’t have yet is an original point of view, which is generally not the sort of thing you come fresh out of college sporting. You are crammed full of borrowed ideas and eagerness then, and spilling it out seems to be the most urgent thing in the world; your lungs are burning with the need for this exhalation. If Mamana is borrowing ideas liberally, he is doing so to feed the massive furnace of his prodigious musical gifts. Even when his songs get fussy—and when songs open with a line like, “One night while cursing Japheth, I noticed that I loved my lover more than she did me,” a certain fussiness is guaranteed—there is a stunning moment where you hear Mamana open up into a joyous sprint, taking each song heavenward for at least a moment or two. The stacked vocal harmonies on “Rhoticity,” for instance, or the gorgeous chorale he builds out of his own voice on “I’m Not Yr Guy.” Classical guitar, little gobs of modular synth, woodwinds, and blurts of distortion—all of it is here, and Mamana is doing most of it.
He also works bits of others’ music into his tapestry in small, cunning ways. “Tell the Truth” samples a luxurious little right-hand run from the Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam-Guèbrou and turns it into a central riff. “Buried in the Yard,” a nearly seven-minute song, sneaks an interpolation of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” into its chords. You can feel the air of quotation, both as an act and as an idea, swarming all around Nothing New, which tips its hand with its album title. The weight of inherited wisdom, unease about this wisdom’s potential fraudulence, hangs heavy: “The last time I went to the movies/I kept on shouting questions/To the characters in the movies/But these people had no answers at all,” Mamana sings dryly on “Last American.”
It’s a vivid moment of isolation that underlines what makes Nothing New so affecting. It’s a deeply wrought album that has the solipsistic and melancholy tinge of one made purely from imagination. But when all of the nouns and verbs that Mamana throws at us recede—and he throws a lot, including “the great-grandchildren of bootleggers,” the Neolithic proto-city of Catalhöyük, the word “palimpsest,” the word “rhoticity”—we are left with Mamana, alone. Loneliness, pure and sharp and non-negotiable, tends to be more profound than even our most profound thoughts.
