Over the course of four albums, Thao Nguyen has been on a mission to get down more than stay down. From her winsome 2008 debut onward, twee has given way to twitch, her formative folksiness gradually overpowered by funk. And with that shift, her lyrical focus has turned less contemplative and more communal, with her 2013 album, We the Common, inspired by her advocacy work for imprisoned women in California.
But her fourth album, A Man Alive!, is something of a full-circle move. Built from the bottom end on up, it's Nguyen's most rhythmically robust, gleefully discordant release to date. It also marks a return to the more self-analytical approach of her earliest efforts, yielding her most candid songwriting yet. These two approaches never feel at odds with each other somehow, and instead, A Man Alive! reinforces the symbiotic relationship between personal trauma and ecstatic physical release.
Guiding Nguyen through this process is her friend and occasional collaborator Merrill Garbus (a.k.a. tUnE-yArDs), who's credited as the album's producer. However, her approach is more like a remixer, as she playfully manipulates the band's constituent elements and amplifies their irreverent qualities. At times, it recalls the Clinton-era alt-rock of The Breeders, Luscious Jackson, and Cibo Matto—bands that shot a distinctly female perspective on life and love through cut-and-paste productions and absurdist funk.
Nguyen and Garbus also share an ability to wade into messy, difficult conversations with poise and clarity. If the sound of A Man Alive! is informed by Garbus' unmistakable presence, lyrically, Nguyen is grappling with absence—specifically, that of her father, who abandoned her family at a young age. "Half of all my blood in vain," she shouts amid the hand-clapped beat and acoustic shredding of "Departure," channeling her pain into puns. Later, on "Guts"—a cool-down strut sounds like its slinked off some mid-'70s Rickie Lee Jones record—she boldly declares, "I've got the guts/ I don't need my blood." The implication: It's one thing to mend a broken heart; it's quite another to extract your DNA.
If much of A Man Alive! sees Nguyen powering through her troubles with grace and groove to spare, she bravely lets her guard down on the tremolo-sparkled centerpiece ballad "Millionaire," which hinges on a line that's both defiant and devastating in its simplicity: "Oh daddy, I broke in a million pieces/ That makes you a millionaire." Atop the blissful dub fadeout "Endless Love," Nguyen sings, "I've got an endless love/ no one can starve," before cheerfully adding this shockingly unsentimental rejoinder: "I don't want it/ I don't want it/ Carve it on out of me." The scar tissue on a healing heart inevitably hardens it, but A Man Alive's great virtue is that Nguyen can still sound like she's having the time of her life even as she's recounting the darkest moments from it.
