Amen Dunes' music is compelling, but it's not always clear what it's trying to convince you of. Since the release of his controversially raucous debut album, DIA, 15 years ago, Damon McMahon was constantly refining the range of his sound—shaving off the fog, vacuuming up elements drawn from pop and classic rock—but kept the narratives relatively oblique. Listening to his latest album, 2018 Freedom, it felt a bit like trying to read a great American novel while holding it in a reservoir of reflections: ideas about loss and severed family ties, even if complete sentences were hard to string together. It was a personal record, but rarely a defining one. you get the feeling that McMahon would rather keep his lyrics dark than condense his ideas into something digestible.
The ideas for Death jokes, his self-produced sixth album, is clearer. On this album he is rawer and stronger with a specific meaning than ever before. Broadly speaking, it's an apocalypse story, in which humanity's final moments on Earth are plagued by the same ills that have haunted us for centuries: hatred, greed, puritanism. Misunderstanding is a recurring theme, as is loneliness, specifically the kind that results when the state fails to care for its citizens. Despite all this pessimism, however, McMahon's view of life, to which he returns again and again Death jokesit's simple and upbeat: “Someday we lose it/So use it.”
These ideas are filtered through warped hip-hop and rave beats, though the particularities of McMahon's phrasing and melodies—his music is always fast or wavy, rarely following a streamlined path—mean that Death jokes it sounds quintessentially Amen Dunes. Whether flirting over a sputtering 909 on the Lil Peep-inspired “Rugby Child” or singing an electro-reggae lullaby on “Purple Land,” McMahon is at a point in his career where he could never be mistaken for anyone else , and although Death jokes is filled with odd details, like the minimal techno interlude “Predator” or the jumbled lo-fi samples at the end of “Boys”, the muscular melodic lines that emerged in Freedom and of 2014 Love still pass.
This connection to the rest of McMahon's music is welcome, because Death jokes it can be difficult to analyze and would look very provocative in the wrong light. It opens with a Woody Allen joke sample, and on the impressive nine-minute penultimate track 'Round the World', essentially the last song before a track made up entirely of samples, he sings about the kids who are “stoned/On their phones/It's so alone and they don't know why.” But McMahon never seems to wag or wag his finger so much as plead for forgiveness and generosity. On “Mary Anne,” a pastoral country ballad addressed to one of the women who sexually abused him as a child, he sounds sympathetic (“In Purgatory, we both perished/When we meet again, we'll catch up with love”) but terse (“I know who you say we are is the same/Eh, we're not the same'.) Other songs, such as 'Boys' and 'Rugby Child', are portraits of violent people driven by forces they cannot fully control. It doesn't seem like McMahon is glorifying victimization or condemning some vague concept of “cancellation culture,” so much as he's trying to find shades of gray in an increasingly black-and-white world.
