Damon McMahon plotted a sharp left turn for his seventh album as Amen Dunes, Death Jokes, learning piano and immersing himself in electronic composition and collage. The result is a meld of experimental pop, indie-rock, and folk, sometimes noisy and disorientating, others conjuring the crooked largesse of Spiritualized. While the album prods at apocalyptic themes, pristine melodies ring through, as on the plague-themed “I Don’t Mind”—a song, McMahon said in press materials, that “blossomed madly, starting with just the little harpsichords” before adding drum loops and “wonderfully fucked” MIDI guitars.
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A. G. Cook: Britpop [New Alias]
Britpop, A. G. Cook’s first album since shuttering the influential PC Music label, is a three-disc odyssey and sprawling showcase for the UK producer and singer-songwriter’s expandable box of tricks. The first disc represents the past, conjuring “an epitaph to PC Music’s now-classic sound, a shiny playground of boing-splat colors and neon noise,” as Chal Ravens puts it in her review. The second, representing the present, brings Cook to the microphone, in the style of 2020’s Apple, and the finale looks to the future, in the sense that “if someone really doubles down on their personality and commits to that, it opens up an interesting path,” Cook said in press materials.