Ryland Bouchard's shifty Good World repulses in one moment, attracts in the next, and in the blink of an eye that 6.1 can swivel to a 1.6. Better to err on the side of charity, and anyway, the higher rating sticks because-- despite its almost satirical opacity-- it divulges just enough meaning to suggest the existence of a map, somewhere, that would impose scale and key upon this incoherent terrain. Bouchard forestalls this demystification simply by rendering a meaninglessly jumbled cipher. This sort of unsolvable cryptology is a well-worn trick of the postmodern sensibility, and if you find yourself annoyed by the phrase "postmodern sensibility," (or "meaninglessly jumbled cipher," for that matter) then this record is definitely not for you.
Even if Bouchard's totems are merely shades, they're various and finely wrought. A wispy catalog of fragmented obsessions, Good World is a hermetic space delimited by the Timex ticks and sprung-cuckoo-clock fugues. It features bleary, mechanical woodwind melodies, drums that mince and shamble, Bouchard's sweetly threatening sing-song vocals, and sinister elevator noir. For a record that wraps up in less than 30 minutes, it covers a lot of ground: There's the music box twinkle of "Stone Giants", spectral death marches and booby-hatch waltzes, peach-fuzzy twee, free-jazz wallpaper (twittering on "The Hunter #2"; droning on "Bloody Knife #3") and comatose klezmer, coolly stylized mysticism; disquieting nursery songs ("One slice/ Two slice/ Three slice/ Four," Bouchard Dr. Seusses faux-innocuously on "Bloody Knife #3"), and outsider-art kitsch. But the unrelenting falsetto and inchoate songs blur all this diversity into one indistinct image, as weirdly magnetic and ineffably off-seeming as a pinhole photograph.
This might be the rare case where the perennially abused "schizophrenic" is an acceptable synonym for "eclectic." Think Flaming Lips after ingesting some psychotropic agent so hardcore you have to take acid just to come down from it, or an Animal Collective more into blissful menace than menacing bliss. On second thought, don't-- Good World is sui generis. Bouchard is an auteur in the Lynchian tradition, imposing a semblance of order on vague significances in a psychologically loaded way that makes the audience feel more like voyeurs than invitees. It's easy to dismiss art that clamors for affection, harder when it seems indifferent. There's probably a German word capable of describing the complex response this album provokes, but in English, I can only say that while I can't profess to "like" Good World, I'm compelled to dwell upon it until I figure out exactly what it might want from me.
