As one half of the the Books, Paul de Jong was responsible for some of the early aughts’ coziest, stoniest reveries. On albums like Thought for Food and The Lemon of Pink, the folktronica duo attracted a cult following with warm audio collages that stitched together left-field hip-hop, melancholic minimalism, spoken word, and emo’s self-seriousness into an expansive mishmash. Their sound was tailor-made for college students: a wide-eyed, world un-weary affirmation of every late-night dorm debate and weedy epiphany. It expressed a nostalgia for the present moment, a sense of trembling fragility and poignancy that can seem indelibly real yet rarely lasts once one joins the workforce.
On his new solo record, You Fucken Sucker, de Jong returns to this familiar terrain of proggy flourishes, fingerpicked guitar, and unhurried jam sessions woven into intricate electronic mosaics and drifting mood pieces. This should be manna from heaven for Books devotees. But the album suffers from a solipsistic haziness, struggling to maintain that youthful magic. If his duo soundtracked a time of heady self-discovery, Sucker is trapped, years later, in the dull roar of a hangover.
Starting with its title, Sucker fixates on futility, immobility and the grinding frustrations of making it through the day. The album is framed as navigating “personal tragedy and emotional fatigue,” but it does little to transmute that pain into something meaningful for the audience. Instead, it freely dumps diaristic scribblings and nihilistic asides and asks the listener to sift for meaning.
Take opener “Embowelment,” which rolls out with energized percussion and impressively swerving melodic interplay. Less than 90 seconds in, it unleashes an unearned primal-scream session. Unceremoniously plopped into the mix and delivered with a minimum of skill or precision, it neatly illustrates one of the album’s central rubs. For every nuanced compositional zig, there’s a sloppy, half-baked zag waiting around the bend.
Action and inaction are recurring themes. “Doings” critiques self-help slogans—“Keep in mind that whatever you’re doing, it’s part of your doing”—then gradually sinks into hopelessness: “When you’re dead, you’re done.” It segues right into “Dimples,” which continues the same theme: “I don’t enjoy what I’m doing/It has all been done before.” Even the winding melody is intoned in monosyllabic tones of do-do-do. On “Doomed,” we get “I can’t do anything” before an overeager chorus of “Fuck you up your ass” and clipped dog barks. This kind of despondency can be fertile artistic ground, but de Jong doesn’t, well, do that much with it, preferring to wallow in the mire. From time to time he’ll jump into action and bring in some movement with high-speed scalar runs or a deft turnaround, but these accents and asides feel like the spasms of energy that punctuate an otherwise crushing depression.
The two tracks that most overtly succumb to those blank, closed-circuit comforts of despondence are respectively the strongest and weakest on the album. “Pipe Dream” offers four and a half minutes of low-key synthesizer bells that drift without melody, momentum, or apparent development; it’s the only time where de Jong lays back and lets the music do the talking. As unambitious as a day spent hiding in bed, it nonetheless engages in a way nothing else on Sucker does. But at the close of the LP, “Breaking Up” attempts a cringeworthy confrontation. A woman screams snippets of dialogue atop some inconsequential noodling. “There’s a girl in a bed,” and “You’re disgusting” give way to “Mad, mad, mad, mad… sad or glad” and “Good better best.” Hardly harrowing, these feel less like catharsis than a drunken tantrum from next door, or a sub-par student theater group. Suddenly we’re back in college, but de Jong is no longer the super-smart, shroomy Derrida fan across the hall. Looking at the title again, one wonders who he thinks the “sucker” is? Is it de Jong, the victim of some unnamed and devastating deception, or is it others who are able to see hope where he sees only despair? Either way, having brought us into the heart of his darkness, we’re left with precious little to guide us back into the light.
