Young punks and experimentalists who began to move away from their scenes’ growing esotericism and set their sights on infiltrating the charts via a “new wave” of subversive takes on pop concepts. One can’t help but compare Verrett’s trajectory to a certain generation of artists who arrived in the wake of the first great era in alternative music. In that sense, Oh, Yuck is weaponized catchiness, a compelling music-box with the depth to match its surface, seeking out a wider audience like a missile with inexhaustible imagination to fuel its fiery surge. If ever there was an era in dire need of more variance, more mystique and topsy-turvyness to its current music scene, it’s ours. The attention paid to every detail, the clear unity of impulse going into a tuneful record, seems enormously exciting in this day and age. Each track teems with perfectly placed flourishes on various instruments that make the record feel like it was recorded in strikingly different locales instead of the confines of a suburban Elk Grove bedroom. Much of Verrett’s latest album, Oh, Yuck, however, is characterized by a newfound ebullience in sound and vision, as showcased in the new video and single “Be Afraid,” a sensational piece laden with pipe-organ hooks and a carnivalesque atmosphere. Sometimes the results can be downright haunting, as it is with last year’s single “Justin Bieber at the Gates of Hell,” which marries supernatural lyrics and macho posturing with dread-tinged, Erik Satie-like piano ambience. Toning down the intricate acoustic guitar work of his math rock days, he has taken the intimate, miniaturist bedroom pop of his previous solo project, Mansion Closets, and subsumed it into the more ethereal strains of present-day R&B. For Damien Verrett, multi-instrumentalist and former prime mover of math rock experimentalists The Speed of Sound in Seawater, pop is simply the broadest possible canvas on which to test his constantly developing songwriting and production abilities while wryly toying with perpetual pop concerns such as power, authenticity and ego.Īs So Much Light, Verrett has gradually cultivated these new stylistic leanings over several years, a time roughly encompassing his graduation from UC Davis, the humbling experience of moving back home and the countless hours spent chiseling at and defining the parameters of his new aesthetic. Unlike more ostensibly sophisticated genres, it can’t be pinned down to any one palette of instrumentation, and even if it periodically backs itself into a corner of rote vapidity and commercial navel-gazing, it always leaves room somewhere for the tables to be flipped, the rules overwritten and the infiltrators to subtly inject new modes and meanings into the DNA. Pop music gets all the attention, but rarely the credit it deserves as a powerhouse of infinitely mutable creative potential.
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