A famous musician once quipped, when he was asked if he is a postmodernist, "Sure, that's the easy way." For those behind the curtain of irony, the desire for genre subterfuge is more than appealing – wanting to have your cake and eat it too – opting for a kind of negative dialectic of earnest sound production, and then re-, or de-, production, as fits the case. Maybe the metaphor of the curtain in the "curtain of irony" is too stagey, theatrical, and ought to be replaced with the mixing console of irony, though nothing could sound clunkier and more unsexy than that. Yet, I think the shoe fits here nonetheless, with Brad Allen Williams' Œconomy, an album so overwrought with intention that it begs the question: Who is the "intended" audience?
The mashup of stylistic heritage and overly lush production (this too, is no doubt intentional), probably speaks to someone, though I find it hard to imagine that the missing centre – draw, for lack of a better term – is not, in the end, entirely self-defeating. Williams is an accomplished producer, collaborator, and presence in LA, and it shows. There is nothing to scoff at when it comes to the fully domesticated and sterile sounds of studio musicians, but their recombination into a pompous script of mostly instrumental bric-a-brac is hardly anything worthy in and of itself. Meeting expectations in tonal clarity only to upend their fulfilment as fully-formed musical pieces propels Œconomy, a concept that must be announced in advance of any listening, because the music itself will not quite get you there.
Los Angeles is like the Athens of music production, and no one could fault Williams for seeing everything already done, a slate that is the furthest thing from blank. When it comes to tracks like "Artifice", or "Boomer", we know there is a fair amount of hoodwinking at stake, and what that means in the final analysis, will not carry the water for a release that knows where it comes from – maybe better than most – but really has no idea where it's going. If that's the point, I want off this ship.
For fans of beautifully arranged and produced layers of experimental strings, guitar, and synths, who might find it less or more saccharine than others. To be fair, this is what Williams wanted, saccharine, and ad nauseum.
