He’s turning on related motifs: being an grownup man but additionally being six years outdated, hanging out, protecting it actual. “New Seashore Tune” has him singing traces like “I don’t know Tarzan! I don’t know Jane!” over some type of classic surf music pattern. “Contact Really” is dramatic strings paired with dumpster drum machines. “Belief” has Helpful screaming over an epic canned guitar riff, his voice breaking as if a boy in a boy choir. “Bandage Off,” has us fascinated by “Mary Poppins and the purses.” All of that is enjoyable to hearken to by itself, but it surely’s not rather more than that.
There’s a homogeneity that plagues these 17 songs: Hearken to them again and again they usually all mix collectively, like they might have come from any document Helpful has ever remodeled the previous ten years. The tracks continually repeat Helpful’s producer tag (“Lucy sweetie! Time to rise up!”), and a few, like “Unusual As Can Be” and “I Do,” contain solely the slightest variation on pattern, drum machine, vocals. It strikes me much less as cohesive and extra as unambitious, a lot in order that his sound— which I’ve in any other case all the time discovered to be particular and pure and peculiar—comes throughout as generic, a facsimile of itself. After all he would do one thing like interpolate Céline Dion whereas shrieking about “being unhealthy for no cause.” We’ve seen that earlier than. A lot of his earlier music sounds free-associative and boundlessly artistic, how “first thought, finest thought” sounds when it’s actually working. As a substitute, Cooper B. Helpful’s Album, Vol. 9 is, at its easiest, “random.”
There’s something to be mentioned for consistency. However isn’t there one thing radical, thrilling, invigorating about taking what you’re keen on about music and increasing it, bringing it to totally different, greater, scarier lands? Whereas I used to be listening to Helpful’s newest, I couldn’t assist however take into consideration Meg Remy’s U.S. Women mission. Remy, too, began out as an actual outsider in pop music. As a substitute of sampling Disney films, she made closely distorted music knowledgeable by midcentury woman teams and ’90s R&B. Over time, Remy went from making music about pop to creating music that was pop: pushing herself in a course that was sleekier and shiner however misplaced none of her music’s creativity, its weirdness, its complexity, its politics. Maybe her work may very well be a blueprint for Helpful. Likewise, listening to Helpful’s tune with Boy Harsher convinces me that Helpful may be extra than simply constant—that, if he desires, he could make music that isn’t solely difficult for us, however is difficult for himself, too.
