Damon McMahon made the dead speak. He had been conversing with them for some time. “I got turned on to a lot of teachers, all of whom are dead,” he says. He learned from legendary French music teacher Nadia Boulanger, comedians Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, and the great hip-hop producer J Dilla. McMahon recruited them all for this year’s excellent Amen Dunes full-length Death Jokes, a protest album that took aim at the music industry’s subservience to the algorithm, the digital grid, and the bottom line. Samples of their voices and many others crowd the record with urgent messages from beyond the grave: warnings about censorship, greed, and exploitation. The problem is that no one would heed them once McMahon was finished with his album.
The making of Death Jokes was a struggle. It took three years, 21 failed collaborations, and three separate mixes before McMahon arrived at a version that satisfied him. McMahon took piano lessons from a psychic medium named Jonichi, a student of Boulanger’s. He taught himself to use Ableton Live and a broken Roland TR-909 drum machine. The idea was to shake himself out of his routine and make music like an amateur again, but he was met with blank stares and furrowed brows from engineers, producers, and studio musicians. McMahon felt that the response from fans and critics was similarly uncomprehending. Death Jokes was a purposefully difficult record, but nobody seemed to take it on its own terms. His frustration mounted in a series of interviews. “It was disappointing. You know, the world often doesn't want to be challenged. That feels very sad to me,” he explained. He began to speculate openly about quitting music altogether.
Death Jokes II comes as a surprise, then, but the accompanying announcement that Amen Dunes is coming to an end is perhaps less unexpected. The critical success of 2018’s Freedom launched McMahon into the upper echelon of the indie music world. A lukewarm reception for the follow-up to such a success is not unusual, and Amen Dunes’ move to the vaunted Sub Pop label surely bought him a grace period in which to experiment. But McMahon isn’t concerned with maintaining his place in an industry that he increasingly sees as irredeemable. “Goodbye, I've barely said a word to you, but it's always like that at parties,” McMahon said. “Let's hope that when we are dead things will be better arranged.”
His farewell note amounts to its own kind of death joke. Whether through a sudden moment of clarity or a dejected concession to popular taste, Death Jokes II is indeed better arranged than its predecessor. McMahon went back to a failed 2021 session to recover discarded parts by keyboardist Money Mark, drummers Jim Keltner and Carla Azar, and several other Death Jokes contributors. He then collaborated with mixer Craig Silvey, one of a few kindred spirits who understood the album, on a pared-down interpretation of its songs. These are less remixes than alternate versions, with the spirit of the originals intact, even amplified. The hip-hop-inspired intros, outros, and interludes are gone, as are the overwhelming collages. The compositions themselves are leaner, with more focus on McMahon’s inimitable slurred vibrato. Now, it is only his voice that is speaking to us, directly and intimately, from behind the veil of Amen Dunes’ demise.
The changes to Death Jokes’ songs are sometimes subtle, but together they are revelatory. “Rugby Child” was the most troublesome track for McMahon to record, as he had to wrestle his 909’s drifting clock by nudging each kick drum along manually. “Rugby Child (300 Miles Per Hour)” simply jettisons the drum machine until its final moments, allowing McMahon’s vocals to guide the song over a metronomic beat. At times, the fundamental character of a track has been altered. The trademark bass from “Boys” is notably absent, and the song’s replacement, now titled “Italy Pop Punk,” drifts instead of pummeling. Both new versions of “Ian,” which bookend II, drop the original’s samples of crowd noise and laughter to provide room for its melancholy melody. The effect is like waking up to a solution to the problem that kept you tossing and turning all night: Everything is suddenly clearer, cleaner, more coherent.
The biggest edit is to the epic centerpiece of Death Jokes, “Round the World,” which loses more than a minute from its runtime and most of its layered samples. The sounds of protest ran throughout the first iteration, from street marches to Boulanger’s vehement declarations on originality. “When you compose, I prefer you to be mistaken, if you must, but to remain natural and free,” she stated in emphatic French. “Round the World (Down South)” removes these, but keeps one important sample: Woody Allen telling a joke about a run-in with the KKK. It’s an open provocation meant to inspire careful consideration about the limits of moral certitude—a provocation that McMahon particularly resents his critics for ignoring. Including it again after so much else has been stripped away is itself one last joke at the expense of those who weren’t paying attention the first time.
Death Jokes was a concept album whose concept nearly overwhelmed the music, an exhilarating, frustrating, wonderfully flawed record. To prefer Death Jokes II is to run the risk of privileging aesthetics over politics, the easy listen over the challenging lesson. But if the original was a complicated monument to its own troubled genesis, II is proof that it was built on a solid foundation: McMahon’s gorgeous songs of love and loss, life and death, simple and unadorned. Like the best jokes, they feel effortless and true.
Correction: A previous version of this review inferred that Damon McMahon ended his Amen Dunes project because of poor reception to his previous album. This is untrue, and has been corrected.
