#artificial go

Vocalist Angie Willcutt stands at the center of the festivities, egging everyone on, herself included. It’s a dynamic, antic performance; her vocal styles shift and stretch, often within a single song. On “The World Is My Runway,” the fabulous, off-kilter fourth track, Willcutt sounds like a mellower but no less self-assured Amy Taylor one moment and Nico, caught delighted, the next. And while it’s easier to imagine the former delivering the line “I wear my birthday suit to the fashion show in my kitchen,” the way Willcutt widens her affected accent on “the world is my runway/I go my way” captures something of the latter’s roomy sincerity. “Red Convertible” takes a slightly different angle. Cole Gilfilen and Micah Wu tumble out tilting bass and guitar parts that keep things just on the playful side of queasy while Willcutt lays down a snotty, confident vocal to match the clicky, clapping, rap-inflected beat. Punching in a lyric like “pass me the keys/I’m fiending for a good time,” she stomps towards Uffie’s staccato hipster flow.

Even more agitated is “Late to the Party.” The band finds its stride with topsy turvy bass and listing cymbal crashes, slashed into with gargled strums and slashes of guitar. The aggrieved chant Willcutt marches out over the jerky funk reminds me of Marcel Wave’s Maike Hale-Jones detailing with vigor the bleak signifiers of urban neglect and corruption on last year’s Something Looming. Here, Willcutt’s lyric “left, right, all around” could be a play-by-play of Musical chairs in-progress if she had left out what, exactly, is all around: “All I see is cement/all I see is aluminum/all I see is broken glass/all I see is plastic/all I see is pesticides…all I see is blocking my view.” Stifling? Certainly. But inherent in that last line is an escape route, the chance to snatch your pleasure back from the ruins – “you gotta laugh at the zombie in the front yard,” per Janelle Monáe. Musical Chairs is not a record that wallows; even the disillusion is fun.

If “The World Is My Runway” and “Red Convertible” have the most fun, then “Circles” is a close third. It shows off Artificial Go’s poppiest indie rock chops, straight out of Melbourne or Dunedin. At the center of this exuberant jangling boogie is another list, matching the narrator’s roving, irrepressible psyche with dogs and theirs – “licking skin like a labradoodle/shaking in my boots like a chihuahua.” Willcutt recites the combos with a gleeful, elastic relish, but, characteristic of her range, finds a smooth Dolly Mixture sing-song for the refrain “uh oh/where do I go?/chasing my tail in circles.” While it doesn’t push the band’s sonic boundaries as far as the deep dubby groove of “Sky Burial,” “Circles” is an early hook into the album’s open-air circus. One song-long statement of purpose on an album peppered with them. My favorite of these is from “Lasso,” the rolling rave-up of an opener: “Come and catch me/let’s play hide and seek.” Why not add another game to the mix? The party just started.