MOMUS
Quietism
(Darla/AMP)
Recently I have found myself silent on the subject of music. I have instead tried to write fiction, horrific, gloomy and laden with dread and fear. As this has increasingly seemed more akin to reportage than fiction, it may be time to return to commenting on what things sound like. Momus immediately hoves into view, loudly declaiming his Quietism, and once more accompanied by a robotic co-conspirator. While the last album, Ballyhoo, skimmed the sheen and surface of synthetic K-pop, the new collection has taken a turn to the exotic, to the world of Brazilian bossa-nova, sophisticated easy listening to turn your stomach.
The songs use beds and beats suggested by AI from carefully crafted prompts, with Momus’ sinister lyricism overlaid, a trifle smothered in sour cream. Quietism… a quiet voice, a lack of activism, but also a total activism through inactivity, as ever we are faced with duality and ambiguity. A quiet life, subtly bringing the influence of Japan (and Japan) to the fore, anti-rock, anti-pop by being completely pop. Quietism here is to be openly quiet, introverted, shy and in doing so to be aggressively inactive, politically and culturally. Momus is here synergistic with SuperShy by NewJeans, also his own song Natsuko Tayama from Stars Forever – a supercharged aggressive rap about shyness.
The album opens with The Actor, a sharp portrait of a androgynous, guileless, name dropping imbecile, who dies in obscurity, “a chatbot ghostwrote his obit, all the other chatbots ghosted it”. The sound is funky, the use of AI allows a diversity of instrumentation, the requested production sits in the 80s, along with the actor and his “fake-ass name”, none of it worth “diddly-squat”, which I choose to believe is an attack on Jeremy Clarkson. Orange Pills is pretty direct in its hatred for a particular orange participant in the global economy and his dumb followers: “You're living on the frail branch, that he is sawing through”, a poison pen to the new world, the queer synth-trills stagnate alongside a simple bossa nova and percussive decay. Continuity Girl is, by contrast, a love song to the one who keeps the singer on an even keel, “Though we know time can be cruel, you'll smooth the change away from scene to scene”, as throughout this album Momus uses references to film and popular culture as metaphors for aspects of life and politics. Love Yourself attacks with bass funk, skewering the culture of self-care which infests social media, which merely leads to people being haunted by themselves, seeking to become a “monster of perfection”, by consuming avocado toast at 5:30 in the morning after an hour in the gym. 30,000 Nights is about living to 80, with lyrics comparing life to a labyrinth, “Inside this spiral maze, In the architecture of delay”, with modern technology removing our ability to get physically lost, comparing this to being lost within your memories, populated by “monsters”, the songs and other things we create during those allotted days. My Apprentice Devil is a wander within that extraordinary memory, a distant vocal mixed with fragmented and strangely arranged sounds, part John Barry, part Wendy Carlos: “In the darkened aeroplane, The trickle of the lipstick, The babble of the sane”. Spoiler Alert takes another well-worn phrase and seems to be commenting on our current world situation, “Block your ears now, spoiler alert, You're going to come to the crunch, Things will start rotting from rack down to ruin”, yet ever the contrarian, also notes “Happy endings are as boring as hell”.
The title track sounds defeatist, lyrically, but suggests a quiet resilience, more of the artistic endeavour of creating a vacuum than the political endeavour of silent rebellion. “When they come for the quietists, I'll do nothing, nothing's what we do.” Gentle backing music, with tinges of atonalism keeps us unnerved and unsteady, just as our own environment is unhinged.
On Noise Reduction the stems produced by his prompts are jangled together to produce a composition more complex than you might imagine from AI, an attempt to silence the “vortex of corruption” around us all. Politicians feature heavily again, a target of the entire project.
Trauma Bingo seems on the surface to attack the young, with their puritanical and constantly offended approach to sex: happy to indulge themselves in a myriad of descriptions for gender and sexuality, but terrified of the dirty act itself: “Gazing like the gormless, how they fidget, Gulping at the gulf they fail to bridge it”. Momus takes delight in discussing how it was when he was young, in carry-on language: “Once, when we were hot to get our rocks off, We'd say: "I want to see you with your socks off!"” The song partners with Love Yourself in the way it approaches modern theories of psychosexual pathology.
The Butcher’s Beautiful Wife takes inspiration from Li Ang’s novel The Butcher’s Wife, and again we are in a world of abuse, chaos and conceptual connection which Momus excels at, described himself as “essential gaudiness”, working on a level of lyricism which does not necessarily bear coherent reading. Phrases and descriptions which work of themselves, without a need for explanation. As an example, I remember knowing the title “Systems of Romance” by Ultravox for a long time before hearing the album, the imagined work was complete in my mind without any need for the sordid act of actually listening to it. The title alone, with its conflict between the praxis of a system and the animalism of romance, was enough in itself: the idea of creating a framework of control for something as vaporous as “romance” naturally appealed to my neurodivergent self.
Life With Eno imagines a tour guide version of Eno, through the gauze and inspiration of Eno’s composition Events in Dense Fog, a surrealist set of imagery: “a briefcase synthesiser, Eno now unfolds, to play us sounds he's made, from birds”. Eno walks a deceased Momus through catacombs in impossible places. This has a thematic connection to older Momus songs, Taking A Line for A Walk, 2PM, similarly informed by guided walks through mythological imagery.
Imposter Syndrome returns to the familiar Momusian theme of masks, worn as masks which declare us to be wearing a mask, masks used as a form of revelation to reveal our true selves. “That's the real joy of impostor syndrome, you just pretend that you're not really who you are.” The protagonist is essentially a conman who wears a mask to tell us exactly what he is, and begins his song by telling us his father died in a vat of chocolate, not as you might expect anything to do with Roald Dahl, but imagery inspired by Nabokov’s novel Despair.
The album, dripping with sarcasm, denial of reality and creation of new reality, ends with Imperial Phase, a half serious suggestion about his own career, “I am the new poet laureate here, and I'm wearing a crown of hot tears….It must be my year, It’s my Imperial Phase”, a phrase originated by Neil Tennant but associated most in my head with The Simpsons. One of the online generators used has created a fantastic synth riff for this song when asked for Italo-Disco, a riff which in any sane world would be on a number one single for months. It’s also his most Bowie moment on the album and is reminiscent of similar meta songs about his own career such as How To Get and Stay Famous, as he ponders “the medal must be in the post”…, undercutting himself with humour, describing himself as “the sacredest cow”.
Despite the humour, there is a melancholia running through this album, perhaps a product of the times. Perhaps a realisation that AI is only being used in this ultra-creative format by a minority of people. We all know its main use is by a league of executive suits in larger music companies trying to create the next Taylor Swift without the “ghastly” business of interacting with an actual Taylor Swift. I suppose if we cannot uninvent AI then let it be used by artists like Momus, although I would, perhaps, welcome a more human collaboration as well.
