#earmusic

His last album per se, NakedSelf, came out in 1999, several eons ago by cultural standards, yet he jumps right back into the middle of it, excoriating edgelord politicians, Britain’s fall, pseudoscience, censorship and internet dating. In fact, especially that last thing. Here’s the quatrain that should sink Tinder forever (but won’t): “A vast mosaic of electric eyes/Watches the slaves of desires/The virtual lives – lonely struggling/Endless lies – loveless coupling/The dance of strangers who'll never meet.”

Johnson basically is The The, the only constant member (he notably had Johnny Marr in the band for a time, but years ago). However, he works this time with a band that’s been well broken in. Bassist James Eller and keyboardist DC Collard have been backing Johnson since the late 1980s, Earl Harvin from 1998 on and only Barrie Cadogan is a relative newcomer who joined in 2018. Thus, the band is well-equipped to support Johnson’s acid asides, his astute observations, his nimble configurations of sounds and rhythm and meaning, with lounge-y, jazzy decadence. They smolder and loom in the shadows, then burst into elaborate crescendos. A guitar saws at the foundations in opener “Cognitive Dissident” as twitchy, techy percussion raises a frisson of doomed hedonism.

As a listener who was aware of The The in the heyday, but not really paying attention, the arrangements here seem a good deal more organic than they used to be. They’re less tethered to the dancier side of post-punk and less reliant on synths. The song that came to mind, repeatedly, in listening to Ensoulment was Leonard Cohen’s “The Future,” for its pitch black humors and poetic litanies.

This has been a terrific year for unexpected returns, and what you realize after listening to latter-day albums by the Cure, Nick Cave and The The, is how younger people sweep death under the table and refuse to look at it, even when it presents itself. By contrast, these older artists ruminate on endings, turning them over in their minds, poking at them to see if they can pry the meaning out. And this is useful, not just for listeners of their own generation, but all of us.

It's worth noting that Ensoulment came to Johnson after heavy loss, first of his brother Andrew who drew the cover art (and most The The cover art) and later of his father. Mortality runs all through this album, but especially in the lovely, elegiac “Where Do We Go When We Die?” near the end. The song resonates because it combines the specific with the mystical, in a way that reflects lived experience. A death sets off an endless round of obligations— “To the sound of raindrops/To the ticking of the clock/We packed your clothes and your books/Took them to the charity shop”— but also opens a window to the spiritual (“Sons become fathers – fathers become sons/And as the river flows back into the sea – then so shall we.”) The mixture of the mundane and the otherworldly is powerful. The writing is exceptionally good. You probably forgot about The The (I did), but it’s time to take notice again.