When was the last time you listened to a full-length album start to finish? “Never,” many confess. “Once or twice,” a couple friends say. “Only that Radiohead album,” one adds.
I really believe a musical album is a story to be heard from top to bottom. I’m not waxing poetic about buying vinyl records or saving your floppy disks—those are outdated, albums aren’t. It’s easy to forget that artists still put time and energy into forming a cohesive narrative via one collection of songs, that when we choose to download one or two of the songs instead of committing to the entire album, we are denying ourselves something. We are completely missing the artist’s larger message, although we may glean bits of it from the few tracks we hear. I admit it is hard to find time to listen to an entire album. But I had to make time for Alt-J.
Recall their debut album, An Awesome Wave. Never before had I heard songs flow into each other like that, had I experienced a contemporary artist put so much time into beautifying one-minute interludes so the album reads more as a long-form musical narrative than a collection of separate units.
Alt-J’s newest release, This is All Yours, does not include the same interludes. Rather, the band was brave enough to make most of the songs four to five minutes long. Each track can stand alone because it has a beginning, middle, and an end. Yet the songs as a group simultaneously create a larger narrative: the journey to Nara. It’s hard to tell where one song ends and another begins, because the transitions are so seamless—from “Intro” to “Arrival in Nara” and finally to “Nara.” And towards the end of the album, “Bloodflood, Pt. II” comes on. The five-minute track includes lyrics from An Awesome Wave, a self-reflexive nod I first doubted. But I now realize that the reference helps build a larger, more epic story: that of the band’s career. Plus, it leads directly into “Leaving Nara,” the culminating song and the exit from the world Alt-J has just built. This is All Yours reminds listeners of the incredible stories artists can tell over the course of an album.
To tell their story, Alt-J uses outwardly confusing words. Their lyrics are more experimental poetry than anything else. Disjointed phrases like “AK / Twenty/ 47/ Civilian” are typical of the band and show up throughout this album. But the various connotations and anecdotes loaded into every word keep their psychedelic sounds in the realm of meaningful art. In All Yours, “The Gospel of John Hurt” features frontman Joe Newman crooning, “Oh, coming out of the woodwork / Chest bursts like John Hurt.” The verse references the gory scene in Alien where an extraterrestrial explodes out of main character John Hurt’s chest. That reference helps convey the overwhelming feeling of being out of place, the aggressive isolation that say, an alien in a human body or anyone “coming out of the woodwork” would feel.
Looking beyond lyrics, All Yours includes some beautiful recordings of bees buzzing and the low hum of twilight. And of course, the band shines in their unexpected vocal harmonies, an important characteristic of their more emotional songs.
Their music may be more experimental, but that’s what is so compelling about Alt-J. They are unafraid to do their own thing in a music scene that demands convention. Most popular music today features the same exact chords and the same exact story told in several iterations. But the boys keep experimenting. During a conversation with Interview Magazine, Newman explains, “We just try to play music we like to hear and we’re absentmindedly sounding like no other band.” Indeed, Newman’s voice is unlike any I have heard before.
Despite these strengths, I must confess that, musically, the album was a little disappointing, especially in light of what I know Alt-J can do. I wanted the band to prove the skeptics wrong and create a great sophomore album. Unfortunately, a few of the songs lose their central melody in a convolution of layered synths, and one even borders on boring in its repetition (“Hunger of the Pine”). Many individual songs may lack instrumental strength, but, taken as a whole, the album maintains its overarching message with track-to-track continuity.
Fans owe This is All Yours a full listen through. Though it cannot match the incredible highs of An Awesome Wave, this sophomore album tells quite a tale. And more broadly, All Yours is an important step in what is sure to be an epic career for Alt-J. Regardless of whether their new album proves successful, the boys are still incredibly creative storytellers.