It takes the first two-thirds of “What I Want” for the drums to catch up to the rhythm carried by Damon McMahon’s ardent voice. Like the mind racing ahead of the feet, the rhythm won’t wait for the beat and vice versa. Once they fall in step together, they become inseparable though. McMahon, better known for his recording guise Amen Dunes, moves through his new record in this way, with an impatience that festers in all the jagged samples, choppy drums, and quavering sentences between the jokes (songs) on Death Jokes.
This anxious momentum carries many tracks to their choruses, and more to their dance tempered climaxes. Other tracks appear to fill out on their own as they progress, as on “What I Want” but also “Rugby Child” with its disjunct background beat, chattering along in an imitation of McMahon’s own tragic verse. Or a well-timed percussive break that punctuates a story, landing after a long anticipatory crawl through hand-picked phrases on the expert “Purple Land.” It’s as if Amen Dunes welcomes this sound procession as a reflection of his own recording process: building tracks up gradually, adding or detracting sporadically and feeling his way through everything else.
Crammed alongside the signature sounds of an Amen Dunes album are the plethora of samples and skits. Accompanying the familiar cold-shouldered bass and buoyant, echoey guitars, McMahon enables other voices to spear pangs of nostalgia, stagings and clippings of personality through Death Jokes’ stories to aid its excellent moodwork. It is exciting seeing sampling methods overlap with other genres. “Boys” in particular takes its samples and spars with hip-hop, dance and techno in a stuttering stop-and-go style that exits thrice before fading abruptly. With drums snaring and adding their rattles to the fray, everything swoops in stirring crescendos and hammer and lung can lift their voices together in congruency.
Death Jokes samples curiously outside Amen Dunes’ comfortable borders, pushing the New York artist into places familiar and unfamiliar within the indie world. The story of the album reflects those changes as well. “Rugby Child” and “I Don’t Mind” both part ways with parts of the past, the “Boys” may be the “whom” they were parting ways with, and “Purple Land” is a song about growing pains in three stages.
As with the progressing rhythm and beats on Death Jokes, much begins modestly with an introspective story that gradually spreads outward until a shimmering mosaic comes into focus spelling out a joke. Amen Dunes is a unique voice in indie music, an emotive voice that breaks the surface tension to dig around in the muck for sequins in the rough. In McMahon’s own words, “My songs are all Death Jokes, and will long outlive me. They remind me not to take myself too seriously.”
gone gazing 