Review: Oneohtrix Point Never “R Plus Seven”

24 Sep 2013 — Evelyn Malinowski

I bought Animal Collective's Strawberry Jam right before listening to R Plus Seven. This particular AC album is the one I never was able to get into; it's also the one that coincidentally sounds most like the style at once encountered on Oneohtrix Point Never's much anticipated new work. If you're familiar with Strawberry Jam, this is a good foretelling of the direction OPN is traveling towards: A strobing, choppy, indecisive, fast, and interruptive mood. 

At the same time, R Plus Seven is a new age album. New age is inherently spiritual, and there is likewise something spiritual, or post-spiritual, about OPN which all his listeners likely enjoy (the same can be said for AC). That said, the church organs, fragmented oriental sitars, choral drone, and chiming rhythms all broadcast a touch of spirituality throughout the album; yet there's also the love-for-the-natural-world and its caprice running around. "Zebra," for example, entails compelling layers which almost act like the striped, undulated creature itself. Uplifting and implicative of wild movement, the track creates the visual effect of a zebra running, an action which animates its stripes against a view of some kind of scenery. In a way, it embodies an appraisal for nature documentaries, or represents the perspective eager to relate, something quintessentially new age and quasi-spiritual. But, as we can see, nature has a tendency to cruelly interrupt.

There's also something nostalgic about "Zebra" in particular. The melodic interface, house keys, and trancy concord that hit almost as a surprise although fittingly all have a fall time 2002 feel, awkwardly. Then, completely changing during the last half of the song, OPN offers a backwards version of the previous melody with a looping sax breathing on top of it.

 

Another striking component of spirituality, or post-spirituality, is the torn up vocal samples of preachings and poetries hacked away at by both the wind and digitalization. One wonders what they are, since we have seen over and over that OPN's sample bank tends to be off-beat and sublime. “He/she" reminds me of blending Dead Can Dance with Tortoise's beloved “Suspension Bridge,” while the opening track “Boring Angel” mirrors Animal Collective's “Fireworks” combined with “#1.” Lastly, "Problem Areas" doubtlessly has a kinship to late 90s jungle sampling. 

“Along” gives us some quiet OPN melodic drone, a little more of the feel found in the earlier releases, pre-2011. One of OPN's signatures, apart from video game theory and nostalgia for the future, might be that he changes the loop sequence just as we begin to fall into it. If we listen to Rifts back-to-back with R Plus Seven to build a comparison, we experience less solid objects and a lot more concentration with the former, less loops switching into dissonance, just loose melodic dissonance, and, perhaps, lamentation (I've always thought early OPN is very sad). “Cryo” is a great example of both.

Notwithstanding, there are no songs that jump out at the listener. They require a few listens and attempts at understanding the rhythm and logic behind the album. Every time it seems like something might open, that doors might open, the frame moves on to a different view, forgetting about the promising moment that was just at hand. The album is too busy with itself, repeating and eating itself, and is bursting at its seams full of choppy voices and sixteenth notes, not going anywhere but wildly suggestive of doing so. If that is the intention, I reckon that the thematics at work are indeed very concentrated. The intented atmosphere of this release is to compel before disappointing ears and imaginations via interruption without any graspable reason or aesthetic. It's like doing theoretical math with symbols which hold no numerical value, then forging a sum, like a literal r + 7. But I don't know anything about math, nor its influences on the spiritual, I just have apperceptions.

R Plus Seven is out September 30th/October 1st on Warp Records. Stream the whole album now via NPR or Spex.