Bent Knee: Say So

BENT KNEE: SAY SO (2016)

1) Black Tar Water; 2) Leak Water; 3) Counselor; 4) EVE; 5) Interlude; 6) The Things You Love; 7) Nakami; 8) Commercial; 9) Hands Up; 10) Good Girl.

It is quite surprising to me that I do not love Bent Knee as much as all the aspects of their music are supposing I should. Goddangit, this is provocative, experimental stuff, with a huge diversity of approaches, not afraid of throwing in extra ferocity or a tad more vulnerability; great singer, challenging melodies that do not, however, make any serious transgressions against harmony, intelligent lyrics, no blatantly obvious nods to trendy fashions... but somehow, somewhere, some­thing about it all still isn't right.

For some reason, on their third album, Say So, Courtney Swain and her friends seem even more distant than they used to be. The music, if anything, gets even more complex and unpredictable: what can you say about a band that sounds like King Crimson on one track, sings in Japanese on the next one, and then goes into a Beyoncé-style R&B workout? And yet, behind all the ambition and the superficially unquestionable presence of soul, I sense surprisingly little real feeling — at the very least, I totally fail to connect with any of this stuff emotionally.

My personal hypothesis, which might, perhaps, seem surprising to other listeners, is that at this point, Swain's vocal artistry and the band's music not so much complement each other as clash with each other. The music here is, by and large, experimental: Bent Knee explore rare time signatures, non-standard instrumental combinations, and genre soups that could somehow synthe­size dark folk, ambient, math-rock, and vaudeville all in one. However, in this they do not reach the efficiency level of, say, somebody like the Mothers of Invention, because the music always has to remember that it serves as the backdrop to Swain's performance — there are very few pure instrumental passages here, and Swain has such a strong presence that whenever she sings, it is dang hard to concentrate on the music. And when the music is experimental, how can one «get it» without concentrating?

On the other hand, Swain all by herself is not quite capable of climbing the golden pedestal re­served for outstanding female performers. Why, I do not really understand: she has a great range, she's got some cool word combos at her disposal, and she has plenty of alluring theatrics in her approach. Yet as time goes by, it becomes harder and harder for her to stay put in the shoes of Mad Ophelia without revealing herself as a certified impostor. For me, the album pretty much crashed from the false start of ʽBlack Tar Waterʼ — like ʽWay Too Longʼ, it also opens the re­cord with ecological metaphors, but where ʽWay Too Longʼ worked as an angry rant, ʽBlack Tar Waterʼ gives us broken-hearted numbness as its chief emotion, and this is a much tougher emo­tion to tackle. Anger is something that we all have; true broken-hearted numbness is rare, and even simulating it convincingly is a task that Courtney Swain struggles with. "I made myself strong / By getting my skin numb" she sings... and I don't believe her. Likewise, "I try to speak but I only leak water" on the next track is sung with a certain enigmatic pretense, but the tonality of that statement seems so artificial that I am left utterly cold.

The cumulative result is that Say So is a very busy, fussy, pulsating album, filled to the brim with ideas; but as a challenging musical statement it falls flat, because there's way too much of the «primadonna factor» in it — and as a primadonna album, well, there's too much fuss and pulsa­tion in it. I share Swain's concerns: for the ecology, for the broken-hearted, for the commercia­lism and insanity of 21st century life (ʽCommercialʼ), I even appreciate the irony when the re­cord's most Beyoncé-like song (ʽHands Upʼ) turns out to be a lyrical condemnation of the cheap thrills of technological progress ("we'll be so progressive darling / solar cell on our roof", "texts loop like a mantra through me / buzzing blasts of dopamine"). But it is an intellectual conundrum, this record, not a feast for the senses, and this is not what counts as great music in my own text­book. I even have trouble talking about individual songs — because it is no fun to praise their deep conceptuality or complex structures or layered arrangements unless it all makes emotional sense, and almost none of it does.

But as an example, I will take the album's nine-minute centerpiece, ʽEVEʼ. It starts out on a cool note — fire alarm-like guitars and see-sawing violins — then, as the note quickly gets tedious, at 1:40 into the song the big drums and distorted guitars kick in, but the expected impression of destruction and chaos never materializes. Why? Because the guitars are not loud enough, dammit; because there is no feeling that the musicians are really into this, because these guys have neither the compositional genius of King Crimson nor the animal drive of, say, Nirvana. In addition, they do not like to operate in terms of individualistic guitar riffs, so there is no single «line» anywhere in sight that you could hang on to in order to weather the storm. Midway through, in one of those rare intervals where the primadonna clams up for some time, there is another chaotic section, with guitars and violins frantically accelerating and finally dissolving in a puddle of ambient noise from which the primadonna is reborn again — see, it might even sound intriguing on paper, but I'd rather go back to The Velvet Underground for my chaos...

I will not give the album a thumbs down: Bent Knee is one of the most daring and challenging American rock bands of our time, and Say So shows no signs of resting or slacking in those de­partments. But after the first two records where their ambitions were still kept in reasonable check, I feel like they may have overstepped their limits and boundaries — without adding any­thing fundamentally new to the table, they have become too entangled in their own cobwebs. But then again, maybe it's just me, and I never liked Tales From Topographic Oceans, either; so if you like yourself a good musical challenge, be my guest; just do not feel surprised when nobody ends up remembering a single thing about this record in five years' time.