Under the shyly nondescript moniker Arrange, Malcom Lacey sets his impulses for abjection and redemption spinning against each other, unleashing turbulent energies. His style of ambient electro-pop hums with quiet urgency, belying its dreamy pace and softly blended pastel tones. This self-therapeutic approach to music might explain Lacey's high yield: This is the third Arrange review I've written in the span of one year. But his productivity is tempered by an uncommon degree of thoughtfulness in the construction of his releases-- he never phones it in. Each record retunes the balance of elusion and revelation. New Memory is the boldest version of Lacey's sound to date, though just by a hair, fitting his track record of growth by dogged increments.
New Memory is consistent with prior albums in its methods of imparting restrained turmoil and distressed beauty. Tenderly pulsing soft synths gravitate toward near-vocal timbres. Their fluent eloquence is a rather ingenious way for Lacey to offset his halting manner of confession and the dignified limp of his rhythm programming. Distant nature sounds flow around the melodies and runaway reverberations engulf them, but sweetening traces of guitar and piano make the drift feel purposeful. In its plentiful transitions, the music gently shreds like tissue underwater and delicately reforms. Lacey deploys his voice judiciously, frequently displacing the emotive peaks onto one of his languid synthesizer solos, etched in the tracks like glowing signatures.
A cursory listen might divulge more of the same for people without my apparently inexhaustible taste for Arrange. But closely following the project this past year has been like watching a picture develop very slowly, a small figure resolving more clearly in the smear of landscape. On prior records, the singer/songwriter quotient was often buried, almost apologetically, under nocturnal ambiance, if not simply banished to make way for instrumentals of striking emotional clarity. These are still important facets of New Memory, but the reticent aura Lacey holds around his singing and songwriting dissipates considerably. This is particularly affecting to witness from someone whose music so often deals with shame.
On a purely technical level, Lacey has gotten better at recording himself, capturing fine textures and clear shapes that were sometimes diffused in blown-out distortions on Plantation, though it didn't harm to songs as indelible as "When'd You Find Me?" and "Tiny Little Boy". More importantly, the relative exposure of Lacey's lyrics reveals them to be even more unnervingly private and distinctively sung than before. The record's leitmotif is hands, often Lacey's own, which on "Caves" are said to be "porous things/ Filled up by anyfing." This is an inexplicable accent for a young South Floridian-- who also sings "with" as "wiv"-- but it's strangely appealing. It's like a negative image of Jeff Mangum's voice, the diction deformed by internal pressures, but excessively hushed and clipped rather than loud and elongated.
Two songs in particular will seem brave or embarrassing according to your temperament, which is why they strike me as brave. After dealing with his relationship with an incarcerated father on Plantation, Lacey directs the denuded benediction "Where I Go at Night" to his mother, pouring his heart out through a clenched jaw. The best part is how pathos turns to delight when the misty piano suddenly leaps into a pertly gated synthesizer, a prime example of Lacey's knack for drawing dark and light into unity. The upbeat conclusion adds rhetorical force to the words of healing. Meanwhile, the title track is a spoken-word performance where we can fully appreciate the natural resonance of Lacey's voice as he exhorts himself "past my own insecurities and rage" to eventually concede, "I can't create a new person/ But I'll create new memories."
In a video promoting the successful Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund the vinyl edition of New Memory, Lacey spends most of his time self-consciously mugging for the camera rather than brooding in shadow, the stock image that would go with his music. What he has to offer is a particularly unvarnished kind of ingenuousness, quite distinct from the more common and flowery varieties, paired with a sensitive touch for making computer music move in free-feeling currents. He's still not flashy enough to be a buzz band. Instead, and hopefully for a long time to come, he holds an intimate space in a clamorous musical marketplace, with a potentially lethal earnestness that becomes a virtue by dint of his humility and honesty.
