Amen Dunes – Death Jokes [Explicit] (2024) [FLAC 24bit/96kHz]

Amen Dunes - Death Jokes [Explicit] (2024) [FLAC 24bit/96kHz] Download

Amen Dunes has always worked with an outsider’s verve, but as he approached his seventh album in fall 2019, it was clear to Damon McMahon that he needed to become an outsider to his own history. “I was tired of the music I’d become convinced I had to limit myself to.” Instead of embarking on a familiar project, he decided to become a beginner again, immersing himself in the fundamentals of both piano and the electronic music he’d grown up with at raves and clubs but never imagined himself able to make. Few Amen Dunes fans might have perceived the lasting effect such music had on his work, but with Death Jokes, these influences would become clear. This album also marks a change in thematic focus; through samples and lyrics, Damon is much more directly critiquing the way American culture exalts violence, coercion, and groupthink as societal inevitabilities.

To learn the piano, Damon hired the first teacher his local shop recommended, a psychic medium named Jonichi who had studied with Nadia Boulanger, a preeminent French conductor and music teacher who left lasting influences on everyone from Igor Stravinsky to Quincy Jones. Parallel to those tradition-focused lessons, Damon was teaching himself how to use Ableton and program drum machines, a departure for a musician who had long avoided working with “any technology more complex than a screwdriver,” but a homecoming for the kid who’d grown up to a soundtrack of techno and rap music.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

Tracklist:

1-01. Amen Dunes – Death Jokes [Explicit] (01:03)
1-02. Amen Dunes – Ian (02:42)
1-03. Amen Dunes – Joyrider (01:01)
1-04. Amen Dunes – What I Want (02:43)
1-05. Amen Dunes – Rugby Child (03:20)
1-06. Amen Dunes – Boys (04:18)
1-07. Amen Dunes – Exodus (04:17)
1-08. Amen Dunes – Predator (01:17)
1-09. Amen Dunes – Solo Tape (01:21)
1-10. Amen Dunes – Purple Land (04:53)
1-11. Amen Dunes – I Don’t Mind (04:03)
1-12. Amen Dunes – Mary Anne (02:52)
1-13. Amen Dunes – Round the World [Explicit] (09:15)
1-14. Amen Dunes – Poor Cops [Explicit] (03:27)

Download from FileJoker:

mqs.pw_AmenDunesDeathJ0kes20242496.rar