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HOT OFF THE PRESS (#22) – Dent May & Mia Vigar
It’s Wednesday, and that means it’s time for Nick Courtright’s weekly first glance at music discovered in the last seven days, whether it be just-released, just-leaked, or some long-lost gem that has remained under the radar. Click here for other recent editions of Hot Off the Press, featuring acts such as Deerhunter, TV on the Radio, Deerhoof, Juana Molina, Crystal Stilts, White Denim, and Grizzly Bear.
Dent May – The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele
to be released February 3rd on Paw Tracks
Report Card: A-
Okay, there’s definitely an element of the terrible here. I mean, look at that album cover. Just look at it. Seriously.
But once you get past that, and listen to the album a dozen times or so, bigger issues start coming up: this Dent May, this straight-from-Mississippi scoundrel, just how serious is he? How much irony is there to his lounge-lizardly, microphone-hanging, bad suit wearing persona? Is all his crooning like an inebriated and discernibly less talented Jens Lekman, all his singing about a formidable cast of losers ranging from college town hangers-on to the unimpeachably woman-rejected to the despondently intoxicated, just part of a master plan to make people smile when listening to music, rather than wallow in the effluvious well of their own bourbonized misery?
Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Let’s recognize that this album—taken seriously enough to be picked up by Animal Collective’s label (though don’t make the mistake of thinking this sounds anything like AC)—is pretty fun, even if it’s also pretty, for lack of a better term, dumb. But that dumbness itself is shrouded in a difficult to pin down intellect, with lines like “Joyce, Whitman, and Camus…will know I’ve never read them,” and songs like “You Can’t Force a Dance Party” and “God Loves You, Michael Chang” being so clever and sing-along-able that it’s almost impossible not to like them.
So while the album at first— with its goofy, bad-1940s-wedding-reception instrumentation—sounds like a half-ass experiment in joke-music, multiple listens reveal an earnestness (think Jonathan Richman) that supersedes the irony lying thickly over every nook and cranny. In the end, don’t look here for dazzling virtuosity, or for dourness or elitist self-pity—this is an album best made for slobbery laughter, or for swooning and staggering beneath the dim lights of a really, really cheap chandelier.
Listen to music by Dent May here
Mia Vigar – True Adventures Happen Inside Your Head
released November 3rd in the U.K.
Report Card: C
Few things perk my intrigue or raise the indignant eyebrow of my skepticism more so than any time a fledgling act is said, in any way shape or form, to reside in the musical vein of one Joanna Newsom. After all, the sparklingly singular harpist, tale-weaver, and Renaissance Faire progeny is so incomparably unique, for better or, occasionally, for worse, that for anyone else to be compared to her puts that person under quite the microscope—it’s true that row after row of potential inheritors to the throne have fallen short. So when the name Mia Vigar scooted across the musical landscape under headlines of Newsom-ness, I braced myself for the slim possibility of being very pleasantly surprised, and the great likelihood that this new artist would find her music subject to the same shortcomings of virtuosity and intellect that have plagued others aiming to attain the mantle.
Ah, hell. Ah, sweet sweet disappointment! There are only a handful of tracks here that don’t border on that most unfortunate of adjectives (annoying), and the vocals seem more overtly affected than naturally nuanced. Also, the childlike instrumentation seems like a poor parallel of Hanne Hukkelberg, who herself can get into trouble with musical cutesiness. While the harp-playing antecedent of Vigar’s comparison forged a reputation via the combination of uniqueness and near-obsessive attention to detail, Vigar seems to get by more on idiosyncrasy than songcraft—most of the tunes here feel a little cobbled together, relying on the strangeness of the sounds themselves to propel the listener’s interest, rather than the compelling arrangement of those sounds. True, there are some nice songs here, but not many, and when it all comes down it, this small-step-in-the-right-direction album can be most accurately described using the title of its best, most finished, and replayable track: “I Wish You Rocked My World.” Oh well, maybe next time.
Listen to music by Mia Vigar here
Read more of Nick Courtright’s writing—some of it daring to discuss music that’s not so obscenely obscure—here