Often it's difficult-- nearly impossible even-- to separate the music from the artist. In the case of Okay, the pseudonym for one-man band Marty Anderson, once you've learned he suffers from a strain of Crohn's disease and is more or less house- and IV-bound, the urge arises to hear his twin debuts, Low Road and High Road, as expressions of his medical condition, perhaps even as meditations on encroaching mortality. Even the moniker Okay sounds like a playful comment on his condition, a response to so many inquiries about his health. Musically and lyrically, his eerie pop music provides more-than-ample support for such an interpretation, but Anderson's concerns are much broader than that, and his songs about friends and lovers, connection and betrayal, war, and music are specifically grounded in a world outside his body.
Like Sparklehorse's Good Morning Spider and East River Pipe's The Gasoline Age, Low and High Road are defined by the eccentricities of their lone creator and inevitably by the circumstances of their recording. Yet, despite those worthwhile comparisons, Anderson has a very distinctive and resourceful pop aesthetic, developed during his years fronting Fremont, Calif.,'s Dilute and working with Thingy's Kenseth Thibideau in Howard Hello. He draws from disparate sources, structuring some songs as hymns ("Replace" rewrites "Amazing Grace") and others as epics in miniature complete with chorales of kazoos (he plays what sounds like a blade of grass on "Sing-along"). His vocals initially can be disorienting and potentially offputting: With its insectoid pitch, his voice sounds as if it's been digitally altered to protect his identity. But it's no affectation, and in fact, its strange, often strained intimacy makes it a perfect vehicle for his wary, weary lyrics.
Anderson builds these 22 songs as carefully calibrated contraptions, fitting together guitar, keyboard, drums or drum machine, handclaps, and whatever other sound satisfies his whim until the sprockets all click into place. This approach gives "Now", "Compass", and "We" a toylike self-propulsion, as if Anderson has simply wound them up and set them to wander around his home studio. But just as he puts these songs together, he also takes them apart: On "Roman", "Devil", and the instrumental "Up" he sets the gears to grind against each other until the songs fall apart in a mechanical cacophony. It's tempting to read this disassembly as self-destructive (which makes the Sparklehorse comparison all the more meaningful) or simply as somatic-- the song as burdened body, the instruments as malfunctioning organs.
Sonically, Low and High Road are more or less identical, but thematically, they are as different as their titles suggest. Low Road is the more pessimistic of the two, gloomily fatalistic and often darkly humorous, especially "Hoot", on which Anderson sings "there's always going to be a war...each and every one of us is a whore." High Road is slightly more hopeful, but guardedly so; On "Good" Anderson sings, "Look for the good/And find the good" over and over like a recovery mantra. High Road is perhaps just a little more streamlined and engaging than Low Road, its pop elements more focused toward a holistic effect.
It's tempting to read these albums as evocations of the afterlife, Low Road leading to damnation and High Road to redemption with Anderson and all of us at the crossroads. And while these two sides of his Okay persona interact dynamically and complicate these albums' relationship to each other, reducing them to expressions of his medical condition ignores the complexities of his seemingly simple lyrics and constrains the music to merely one meaning. Perhaps even unintentionally, Anderson has created two complimentary works that sound so much larger than his predicament.
