He’s turning on similar motifs: being an adult man but also being six years old, hanging out, keeping it real. “New Beach Song” has him singing lines like “I don’t know Tarzan! I don’t know Jane!” over some sort of vintage surf music sample. “Touch Actually” is dramatic strings paired with dumpster drum machines. “Trust” has Handy screaming over an epic canned guitar riff, his voice breaking as if a boy in a boy choir. “Bandage Off,” has us thinking about “Mary Poppins and the purses.” All of this is fun to listen to on its own, but it’s not much more than that.
There’s a homogeneity that plagues these 17 songs: Listen to them over and over again and they all blend together, like they could have come from any record Handy has ever made over the past ten years. The tracks constantly repeat Handy’s producer tag (“Lucy sweetie! Time to get up!”), and some, like “Strange As Can Be” and “I Do,” involve only the slightest variation on sample, drum machine, vocals. It strikes me less as cohesive and more as unambitious, so much so that his sound— which I’ve otherwise always found to be special and pure and weird—comes across as generic, a facsimile of itself. Of course he would do something like interpolate Céline Dion while shrieking about “being bad for no reason.” We’ve seen that before. So much of his earlier music sounds free-associative and boundlessly creative, how “first thought, best thought” sounds when it’s really working. Instead, Cooper B. Handy’s Album, Vol. 9 is, at its very best, “random.”
There is something to be said for consistency. But isn’t there something radical, exciting, invigorating about taking what you love about music and expanding it, bringing it to different, bigger, scarier lands? While I was listening to Handy’s latest, I couldn’t help but think about Meg Remy’s U.S. Girls project. Remy, too, started out as a real outsider in pop music. Instead of sampling Disney movies, she made heavily distorted music informed by midcentury girl groups and ’90s R&B. Over time, Remy went from making music about pop to making music that was pop: pushing herself in a direction that was sleekier and shiner but lost none of her music’s creativity, its weirdness, its complexity, its politics. Perhaps her work could be a blueprint for Handy. Likewise, listening to Handy’s song with Boy Harsher convinces me that Handy can be more than just consistent—that, if he wants, he can make music that is not only challenging for us, but is challenging for himself, too.
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