Review: Oneohtrix Point Never’s ‘Age Of’
I ate the forbidden fruit by listening to the leak. Thinking about leaks induces some dread in me. What if I’ve pissed off my idol by not waiting until the record arrives to the world in sleek digital (and physical) form? But then I’ve already done the pre-order and, and oh well — I gave in anyway.
To reduce suspense, it was worth it. Age Of is a record that defies just being electronic music, and I knew from the previews. It built on me even out of context. Though they were 30 second capsules of parts of songs, not defining moments, I estimated: progressive pop (The Station), country pop (Babylon), art pop (practically most of the record), then leaning into avant-folk (RayCats), modern classical/soundtrack music (Toys 2), dark ambient (bits in the record), nu jazz (Still Stuff That Doesn’t Happen, Last Known Image of A Song), plus some punishing noise and post-industrial textures (We’ll Take It, Same). The full album in itself expands on these sounds to a brilliant degree, in touch with the textural indulgence of R Plus Seven and Garden of Delete but heavily focused on pop structures, much more than before and, as has already said, equating to Lopatin’s most ambitious record yet.
However, Age Of is multifaceted; despite the first impressions, it is not entirely baroque. The MYRIAD narrative (presented as a ‘concertscape’ in Park Avenue Armory and, soon, the Barbican) plucks its imagery from Renaissance grotesques and surreal sci-fi, but uses the symbols of nuclear fallout (apparent in the music video for Black Snow) and scattered Internet imagery (the MYRIAD trailer). It’s just as well that it aligns with the album. Age Of is also what I call a landscape record, quite literally from how it was written and produced. Lopatin sculpted it in an Airbnb lodge in South Massachusetts with an appearance like a glossy egg but with a gigantic medieval chandelier inside; the lodge in nighttime became what I’d think was a cerebral horror film set, what with the chance of dying via collision with the spiky chandelier, and the stark contrast between day and night can be heard on the final record.
A standout feature on Age Of is Daniel Lopatin’s own autotuned vocals (which if anything I adore, especially in the same realm as ANOHNI and Prurient). From my overview, this immediately turned off too many early listeners: most compared his vocal style to, say, Bon Iver after only a couple of seconds of exposure. I disagree. In ‘The Station’, his vocals gradually turn from the expected multi-layer autotune to quivers and sudden formant turns, instantly reminiscent of ‘Sticky Drama’ off of the aforementioned Garden of Delete.
At that point, not just vocally but instrumentally, it becomes fair to say that The Station is Age Of’s Sticky Drama. Despite it not having thundering cybergrind breakdowns and nu metal vibes, it carries the same jarring twists and turns, strobing glitches and, most of all, the unsettling dark sensuality present in both songs. Knowing it was written for Usher is what blows my mind, although it’s fair to say Lopatin is the perfect line between the mainstream and the avant-garde with how he chooses his inspirations.
While Age Of vaguely shares some avant-pop senses with albums like Gobby’s ‘No Mercy Bad Poet’, Zammuto’s self-titled album, and, alas, Bon Iver’s ’22, A Million’, the detail missing in all of those records but is present in Age Of is aesthetical world-building, inside the record sonically and outside it in the form of MYRIAD. Lopatin’s glossy darkness has been familiar since 2011’s Replica, although he has in no way doing the same thing for years. Here, he hypercontextualizes it, and to be more exact in the wording of the Ccru (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit): turns it hyperstitional. His sound design has wilded out to a cinematic extent just as beautiful as Garden of Delete, and scrambled soundbites are less easy to trace back to their sources (what’s the reversed voice in Manifold?! that Run DMC sample 730 songs have used?).
His collaborators (James Blake, ANOHNI, Prurient and Kelsey Lu) fit perfectly to justify his avant-pop sensibilities, audibly sprouting with every track. In a musical world where ghosts of Bach’s harpsichord concertos are the mere gates to a magnificent landscape made of Coil, Brian Wilson, Hans Reichel, Laurie Anderson, serpentwithfeet, Florian Hecker, László Hortobágyi, Claude Speeed, Robert Wyatt, Oval, Brad Fidel and Carl Stone, as well as the aforementioned collaborators, Lopatin guards the non-Euclidean golden sprawl as Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood’s ‘Some Velvet Morning’ plays faintly in the background.
10/10.
