Death Jokes

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To say that a lot has happened since the last Amen Dunes LP was released would be an understatement. Freedom, the fifth album Damon McMahon made as Amen Dunes, came out in 2018, a.k.a. "The Before Times." That release found McMahon continuing his trajectory of crafting increasingly expansive takes on lyrically dense, sonically challenging music, to the point that it sounded as if he had almost arrived at a perfect convergence of intensely personal yet broadly accessible indie rock. But that was the 2018 version of Amen Dunes. Since then, in addition to a global pandemic, McMahon, whose own case of COVID-19 was particularly brutal, also became a father for the first time and relocated from L.A. to upstate New York.  And, over the span of more than two years, he conducted an agonizingly protracted series of attempts to get a sixth Amen Dunes album going. Notching more than 20 "failed collaborations," McMahon admittedly struggled to find the right way to move forward from the sounds of Freedom, so instead, he appears to have retreated backward—not to the sounds of his earlier discography, but to the music of his formative years—sample-heavy electronic music—and to the fundamentals of piano. (He apparently hired as a piano teacher "a psychic medium ... who had studied with Nadia Boulanger.") And while a few of those failed collaborations leave their mark on Death Jokes, for the most part, this album very much evokes the sense of a guy working on his own to make some sense of the world through music. Faint flickers of the classic rock vibe of Freedom emerge occasionally on Death Jokes (the "Riders on the Storm" hat-tip at the beginning of "Exodus," for example), but this is a decidedly glitchy affair, thick with found sounds, weird samples (including one of Nadia Boulanger, hilariously), and twitchy drum machines. It manages to be both claustrophobic in its intensity and wide-ranging in its approach to sound, moving well past the lo-fi/folky axis of Amen Dunes' earliest works and decidedly to the left of the explicitly mainstream Freedom. The gothy overtones of a brief interlude like "Joyrider" (all gloomy keyboards and howls) manages to be both an outlier and a flag in the ground, indicating that weirdo melodrama is not in short supply here. To be sure, whether it's the buzzing electro-futurism of "Predator" or the nine-minute epic "Round the World" moving through pianistic simplicity and sample-drenched overload, there's a fragile sort of maximalism to Death Jokes that's both invigorating and overwhelming, making it well worth the long wait. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz