They hint at death, the mortification of the spirit, the fragility of the body: “Safety isn’t real anymore/It’s just a thing we say,” he sings on “Film It All,” with his voice needling in the red. His lyrics, accordingly, only leak through in fragments. The violence he does to his own singing feels personal, even vengeful, like watching someone scribble out a picture of their own face until the paper rips. On “Film It All,” he nearly melds with the screaming digital static bursting around him. On “Squelch,” he distorts and treats his voice until it bubbles from the bottom of the mix like a ghoul.
He still sounds small, maybe a little frightened, but he is exposed here, and what you hear has a menacing edge. In this new environment, Powers’ voice surges to the fore, like maybe we’ve never actually heard this guy at all. Mulberry Violence leaps with both feet: You get the sense that Powers wouldn’t rest until he looked over his shoulder and Youth Lagoon was nowhere to be seen. Powers leaned this direction on 2015’s Savage Hills Ballroom and shortly afterward, he declared that Youth Lagoon was over. The stylistic touchpoints seem to be the creeping dread of Portishead, the ragged voice manipulations of Bon Iver’s 22, A Million, the weedy urban-ruin expanses of King Krule.
The silences are thicker, they yawn wider, and the sounds they separate tend to clip out like shorting wires. The drums are broken, loud, and looped, and they splatter when they hit. Indie rock, with its rounded edges and primary colors, is gone.
Mulberry Violence, his first record under his own name, takes a rusty trowel to this sound and disembowels it.
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