A Kingdom of Choice: The Paradoxical Music of alt-J

alt-J

"I basically went to art school to start a band," said Joe Newman, lead singer and guitarist of the British art rock band, alt-J, of the project he started with fellow bandmates at Leeds University,

For this review, I looked at "This Is All Yours", their sophomore effort.

alt-J is your quintessential millennial band, from a technological era where musicians no longer need to rely on music studios, producers, or even traditional musical instruments to make music.  Nowadays, you can do it right from your laptop, composing from your bedroom scores that rival anything that professional bands have accomplished in studios over the last several decades.  It has revolutionized music.  This describes alt-J and their sound.  Along with this creative, DIY ethic comes a liberation from form and restrictions.  alt-J's music does not follow any particular song format - verse-chorus-verse-chorus.  Their songs are stream-of -consciousness explorations of ADD-driven whimsy and intrinsically subjective fancy.  Not limited to one genre, their music is a melange of folk, trip hop, blues, classical, dubstep, and other forms of electronica.  Whatever suits their mood.  The result is a stunning mind-trip, a paradoxical trip to the dark side of the moon on a neon spaceship.

This Is All Yours

For instance, the song "Choice Kingdom" does not rely on traditional vocals.  The band favors a use of vocal loops, and in this song, the words are sung only one syllable at a time so that the message is diminished in favor of the voice as an instrument rather than the conveyance of a message.  But alt-J does put across a message, although couched in artsy obscurity, James Joyce style, like their lyric in the Nara Trilogy - "Arrival in Nara", "Nara", and "Leaving Nara".  These three songs talk of a gay love affair in Nara, Japan.  They feature the repetition of the words:  "Hallelujah, Bovay, Alabama".  Nonsensical at first appearance.  But this references one of the founders of the Republican Party and a region known to not be friendly towards the gay community.

Musically, they flaunt their free-spirit, their refusal to be classified - everything from the '60s blues rock of "Left Hand Free" to the Bright Eyes-like folk of "Warm Foothills" with its unknown female accompanist.  From one moment, they can go from chamber orchestra to synthpop to using medieval vocal arrangements.  Like "Pusher", with its remarkable Fleet Foxes vibe.  My favorite tracks are "Every Other Freckle", which runs the gamut, using a dubstep bass over tribal rhythms and layers of vocals, and there is "The Gospel of John Hurt", a mellow trip hop beat with robotic vocals singing about the alien bursting out of John Hurt's chest in the movie Alien.

This band has been amazingly humble and surprised at their contribution to the music world.  But what the world needed was artists to think outside of the proverbial box and redefine what music means to us in the digital age.  And this description fits the music of alt-J.  They break cliches and shatter norms.  They are iconoclasts, and you are going to have to go and do some thinking after listening to this one.