He’s turning on comparable motifs: being an grownup man but additionally being six years previous, hanging out, preserving it actual. “New Seaside Tune” has him singing strains like “I don’t know Tarzan! I don’t know Jane!” over some kind of classic surf music pattern. “Contact Truly” 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 occupied with “Mary Poppins and the purses.” All of that is enjoyable to hearken to by itself, however it’s not rather more than that.
There’s a homogeneity that plagues these 17 songs: Hearken to them again and again and so they all mix collectively, like they might have come from any report Helpful has ever remodeled the previous ten years. The tracks consistently 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 at all times discovered to be particular and pure and bizarre—comes throughout as generic, a facsimile of itself. In fact he would do one thing like interpolate Céline Dion whereas shrieking about “being unhealthy for no motive.” We’ve seen that earlier than. A lot of his earlier music sounds free-associative and boundlessly artistic, how “first thought, greatest thought” sounds when it’s actually working. As an alternative, Cooper B. Helpful’s Album, Vol. 9 is, at its best possible, “random.”
There’s something to be stated 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. Ladies challenge. Remy, too, began out as an actual outsider in pop music. As an alternative of sampling Disney motion pictures, she made closely distorted music knowledgeable by midcentury lady teams and ’90s R&B. Over time, Remy went from making music about pop to creating music that was pop: pushing herself in a route that was sleekier and shiner however misplaced none of her music’s creativity, its weirdness, its complexity, its politics. Maybe her work could possibly 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.
