It brings out similar motifs: being a grown man but also six years old, hanging out, keeping it real. “New Beach Song” has him singing lines like “I don't know Tarzan! I don't know Jane!” over some sort of vintage surf music sample. “Touch Actually” is dramatic strings mixed with drum machines. “Trust” has Handy screaming over an epic guitar riff, his voice breaking like a boy in a choir. .'Bandage Off' makes us think of 'Mary Poppins and the Purses.'' something more than that.
There's a homogeneity that plagues these 17 songs: Listen to them over and over and they all blend together, as if they came from any record Handy has made in the last ten years. Tracks constantly repeat Handy's producer tag (“Lucy sweetie! Time to up up!”), and some, such as “Strange As Can Be” and “I Do”, include only the slightest variation on a sample, drum machine, vocals. It strikes me as less cohesive and more unambitious, so much so that his sound—which I've always found otherwise distinct, pure, and strange—seems generic, a facsimile of itself. Of course she'd do something like interject Celine Dion while yelling that she's “bad for no reason.” We've seen it before. So much of his earlier music sounds freely associative and limitlessly creative, how “first thought, best thought” it sounds when it actually works. Anti, Cooper B. Handy's Album, Vol. 9 it is, at best, “accidental”.
There is something to be said for consistency. But isn't there something radical, exciting, refreshing about taking what you love about music and expanding it, bringing it into different, bigger, scarier lands? While listening to Handy's latest, I couldn't help but think of Meg Remy's US Girls project. Remy, too, started out as a true outsider in pop music. Instead of sampling Disney movies, he made heavily distorted music informed by mid-century girl groups and '90s R&B. Over time, Remy gave up music for pop to make music that it was pop: pushing herself in a direction that was more elegant and glamorous, but lost none of the creativity of her music, its strange nature, its complexity, its politics. Perhaps her work could be a blueprint for Handy. Likewise, listening to Handy's song with Boy Harsher convinces me that Handy can be more than consistent – that if he wants to, he can make music that's not only challenging for us, but challenging for himself.
