There’s a weight to villagerrr’s latest project that ages Mark Allen Scott’s songwriting far beyond his years. Carousel, Scott’s fifth LP as villagerrrr, is a searching and expansive plea for meaning in the modern age. Scott’s music feels like a mirror shattered and pieced back together, refracting off itself in the light. Lucid and searing, villagerrr’s down-country, lo-fi indie-rock has a special way of tugging at the heartstrings. Maybe it’s Scott’s trembling vocals, his childishly frank lyrics, or the quiet, orchestral instrumentation. Maybe it’s the album’s insistent sincerity and refusal to dissimulate. Whatever it is, it’s working: the LP cycles through shoegaze, alt-country, and indie-rock with a quiet insistence, a shout into the void that the listener feels compelled to answer in kind.
Carousel finds Scott exploring what it means to be a real person in an unreal world with a determined nakedness that disarms the listener almost instantly. For the project, he has enlisted a coterie of collaborators from musical universes parallel to his own, creating a deceptively rich textural mosaic within songs that feel down-home. Gauzy and wistful, it nurtures a cautious optimism that peeks out from the album’s melancholic corners at unexpected moments. Interwoven steel pedal, glockenspiel, banjo, and violin create a dreamscape simultaneously airy and stable enough to carry forth Allen’s delicate head-voice without drowning it out.
On “Virginia,” a pensive, downbeat song full of violin, cello, and guitar—and my favorite on the album—Scott wrestles with the impossibility of moving forward from the entropy around him. It’s a seven-and-a-half minute clarion call that still feels like it’s over too soon, a downbeat space for Scott’s openhearted lyrics to shimmer. “How do you learn to tell yourself what’s real and what’s fake?” he croons. The latent question beneath it: how can we hope to survive in a world that feels too big and too full to even take a breath in? And on “Indiana,” the artist and his crew of collaborators nestle into a heart-wrenching, almost otherworldly minimalism buoyed by h. pruz’s wispy soprano. There’s some aspect of Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek’s duet album in it, and not just because of the song’s name: “Indiana” is a love song that doesn’t feel necessarily romantic, a cozy ode to connection that feels suspended in time and space.
Grittier moments, like the mumblecore, drum-heavy number “Gleam,” make clear that clarity remains out of reach. “No I, I don’t know why,” Scott murmurs, the words bleeding into each other until they’re nearly unintelligible. “Locket,” the album’s lead single, is all sliding guitar and layered vocals, brooding and pensive, spiky guitar riffs underlaid with soft, bleeding vocals. “What Does It Mean?”, the album’s last song, makes clear that the LP’s bildungsroman is not yet complete. There is a fear of life running away, too quick to catch: Scott croons, “Summer is coming / August will leave.” Already, time crushes in on itself. The album ends in a question, and that’s no accident. Carousel is an album of what-ifs, pleases, whys, and why-nots. It’s a lovely, cotton-edged rage against a dying light—a candle in a cavern. villagerrr has never sounded so strange, so self-assured, or so melodic. Most of all, Mark Allen Scott’s prayer for life has never felt so livable. [Winspear]
Miranda Wollen is a staff writer at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her @mirandakwollen or email her.
