As a founding member and driving force behind the band the Internet, Matt Martians got better the old-fashioned way: album by album, the group tinkered and tightened and scraped away dust, gradually revealing their identity as an adept lite-funk outfit. Their third full-length, 2015’s Ego Death, twinkled softly, but with enough clarity to earn a Grammy nomination and radio play. After all that hard work, Martians unwinds on his new solo record, The Drum Chord Theory, slackening the traditionally taut lines of funk and rap to make a droopy, indolent album.
This is music judiciously leached of urgency. Martians keeps verses short or excises them completely, so there isn’t much of an opportunity to upshift into refrains, which mostly come in the form of repetitive chants or near-whispers. Sometimes the drums and bass are overlaid at odd angles, hinting at a ’90s hip-hop groove but splaying sideways rather than cohering into something clipped and commanding. After a few minutes of a vamp—keys and rhythm section, maybe hand percussion and a stray guitar line—the band tires and moves on to a new one, frequently within the same song.
The recumbent funk comes paired mostly with stories of romantic woe; a central riff may change, but the male-female disconnect remains paramount. “We can’t read minds,” Martians laments, addressing any potential future partners who might be listening on “What Love Is.” “We just want to know what the fuck you want—is that hard?” “Every time I think I found the one, something always goes wrong,” he sings a couple tracks later. But he continues his search, assuring a woman on the album’s final bonus cut, “Elevators,” “that girl from the dream was you.”
These feelings don't bloom into anguish; The Drum Chord Theory is dillydallying on lazy Sunday, with stormy Monday kept at safe remove. Martians lightens the mood by flying into a synthetic, “Alvin and the Chipmunks” register to undercut a possible commitment—“if you were my girlfriend, I'd make you feel good”—and peppers songs with asides like the enthusiastic Internet endorsement that closes “Where Are Yo Friends?”: “Syd, Chris, Steve, Pat, Jameel, I love y’all niggas man,” he says, name checking bandmates. Then he adds happily, “But everyone else man, if we ain’t cool, then I’m sorry.” There’s meta-commentary, too: after a couple tunes reorganize around a different vamp at the halfway point, on “BabyGirl,” Martians quips “Ain’t no hidden track back here—next song.” Cue a track change.
If you won’t come to The Drum Chord Theory for a bracing shot of adrenaline, supine doesn’t mean unenjoyable. The more Martians sinks into his funk hammock, the better. On “Southern Isolation,” the bass squirms up and down the scale, evoking Caetano Veloso’s great “Olha O Menino,” while the singing washes back and forth, unhurried and opulent, like a sloop bobbing on the tide. Elsewhere, the band keeps sketching outlines and leaving them behind, dangling one riff, teasing it a bit, discarding it. Martians doesn’t return to the rapturous, near nod-off state of “Southern Isolation.” The Drum Chord Theory is never unpleasant, but it’s also never very distinct.
