Imagine an octopus: agile, stealthy, colors in flux. Now imagine the ink spreading out, the black fog of the disappearing act. Over the past 19 years, Matthew Dear has been a little like that cephalopod, flitting between aliases and sounds—bristly minimal house, thundering peak-time techno, shape-shifting electronic pop. On 2007’s Asa Breed, he reinvented himself as an unconventional singer-songwriter and black-hearted crooner; his voice has been his ink ever since. It has never been thicker than it is on Bunny.
Dear has always been a trickster. He likes slow-motion house grooves designed to wrongfoot would-be dancers—slick with grease, the rhythms kinked, synth tones distended and dissonant. In his early years, his music was notable for its brittleness; his beats sounded like they’d been frozen and smashed into a million pieces. But his music has gradually gotten more and more viscous. On Bunny, that starts deep in his throat. His voice is Bunny’s focal point, allowing him to stay hidden and slip the bonds of the confessional singer.
Mixing blurry bits of new wave, disco, and indie rock, his productions are plenty interesting, but that voice lends the essential element of intrigue, helping blur the contrast between Dear and the subjects of his songs—between the family man of his biography and the narrator of “Bad Ones,” who admits, “I played a role in all your tears/Hate flowers but they seem to work on you my dear.” He growls, purrs, and bellows, diving down to the depths of his lower register and dredging it up like silt. His voice is less a manifestation of his being than his being is a manifestation of his voice. All that artifice—the lung-scraping vowels, the charred vocal fry, the cartoon-villain sneer—becomes its own reality.
Dear has long relied on a fairly simple set of tricks to manipulate his voice. He’s especially fond of doubling it, so that a quavering falsetto hovers like a halo over his gravelly baritone—a fitting split, given his propensity for angels-and-devils dichotomies in tales of love and self-loathing. He’s still using the same techniques here, but more than ever, he’s exploring the sheer physicality of his instrument by reveling in the grain, the flesh, and the phlegm. And in the process, his voice is becoming more his own. On previous albums, he sometimes felt like he was trying on his best Bowie impersonation. Traces of that linger—“Modafinil Blues,” one of Bunny’s highlights, sounds like it was written in Blackstar’s shadow—but he’s casting a wider net for inspirations here. He draws in bits of Gary Numan, Peter Murphy, Leonard Cohen, and even Johnny Cash, distilling them into his own distinctive strain.
Bunny doesn’t break in any real stylistic way from its predecessors. Dear’s beats still shuffle and drag, relishing the friction of heavy objects on sticky floors; his palette still brims with dark streaks of synth, dubbed-out effects, daubed-on funk. The occasional novelty helps this material feel fresh. Protomartyr’s Greg Ahee lends a Vini Reilly-like guitar touch to the opening “Bunny’s Dream.” On two songs, Tegan and Sara make good on Dear’s longstanding but largely sublimated desire to make actual pop. His music has never sounded more forceful than it does on songs like “Can You Rush Them,” a slow, woozy anthem in which the layers are fused together until they suggest a cyborg take on Tuvan throat singing. “I was a bad man/Until I found God—asleep,” Dear begins. The way the song builds from this opening, with its playful inversion of classic redemption narratives, is thrilling. It all comes down like a mudslide.
In mood and tone, Bunny marks a subtle shift from its predecessors. (Just compare the pink sleeve with that of Beams or Black City.) On the sex-slathered Black City, Dear’s obsessions took the form of charged images (“little red nightgown”) chanted in a leaden voice. But here, on the greasy slab of dissonant disco, “Electricity,” he’s got a manic glint in his eye, even if he sounds perpetually at war with his worst instincts. On “Bad Ones,” when he pleads, “I haven’t told you lies this year,” there’s little doubt that the wounded Lothario’s plea for sympathy is itself the biggest joke.
There are no great revelations in the lyric sheet. Most of these lines wouldn’t survive more than a few minutes without the oxygen he gives them. Instead, the album’s pleasure is in its gooey matrix of conflicting sensations: the slapback delay on his vocals during the swampy “What You Don’t Know” or the gloopy tangle of “Duke of Dens,” an instrumental whose layers resist teasing out. In “Modafinil Blues,” a silky new-wave-disco song about desperation, the breakdown shows how careful Dear’s touch is. He fleshes out an unusual groove, then strips it back to leave room for a single synth, shining like a silver dollar in the gutter. The album drags a little in the middle, and its Ricardo Villalobos-sampling conclusion feels anticlimactic. But at Bunny’s best, Dear is as slippery as ever. Following in his purple wake and soaking in his twisted tragicomedy is a chase to be savored.
