I have never put on a record because I wanted to think of the Siege of Vienna. I have never closed my eyes and thought of Kahlenberg, the mountain, and known that the Ottomans were closing in. I have never put on a record because I wanted to think of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw. I don’t know why anyone puts on a record. I do know that music often sounds really good when you are in love, and that is a good reason to put on a record. Also, music often sounds really good when you are sad and when you are grieving, and that is a really good reason to put on a record. On his second album, For Every Set of Eyes, J. Mamana considers the Siege of Vienna. He also considers grief. It is a frustrating and beautiful record.
Mamana’s music appeals to a bookish set. It asks that you maybe already like Mahler and Bartók. It implies that you might subscribe to the literary journal n+1, where you will find an ad for Mamana’s album in the pages of the newest issue. (Perhaps you will have already read his n+1 essay from last year, about the Ethiopian composer Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru.) It is tricky to be so expressly referential in music without being a snore. Mamana’s “It’s Bastille Day,” which is about Bastille Day, includes a particularly jarring Françoise Hollande name-check that doesn’t quite pay off. And For Every Set of Eyes isn’t exactly an easy listen. It demands that you focus and pay attention to how everything swirls together. Somehow, he more or less pulls it off.
As was clear from his last record, Nothing New in the West, Mamana is most comfortable writing extraordinarily high-concept songs, some of which are indebted to Beethoven. But his work is also very much in conversation with baroque indie pop composers Koenig and Longstreth. Unlike Longstreth, who wrote a sexy pop song about goblins, or Koenig, who wrote one about eating falafel, Mamana is entrenched in the baroque. He writes impenetrable music that is both deeply rooted in Kabbalah and also about fast food. In “New America,” he sets the Magi and Belshazzar near a Wendy’s. It is kind of like a Van Dyke Parks song, ridiculously ornate, exactly what you would want to hear while riding a cartoon stick horse through Camelot.
