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The rapturous response to Marcus Brown’s debut album as Nourished by Time, 2023’s Erotic Probiotic 2, has come to look extra like future. After years of strange jobs, false begins, and aborted inventive experiments, the Baltimore native and Berklee Faculty of Music alum spent COVID holed up in his dad and mom’ basement concocting a brand new sound, blithely unconcerned about what the world may assume. Armed with Ableton, electrical guitar, and a Roland Juno-106 synthesizer, Brown blended dream pop, ’80s R&B, deep home, electro-funk, hip-hop, and Baltimore membership in daring, unique methods whereas expressing socialist concepts and non secular considerations in an earnest, bare baritone redolent of the Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan and Jodeci’s Okay-Ci Hailey. It’s troublesome to fathom the document as a debut; it has the timeworn air of an album that took years to make—and the fast-and-free ethos of a practiced savant lastly keen to let it fly.
Since Erotic Probiotic 2’s launch final spring, Brown has landed a great deal of new followers, vital acclaim, cross-the-pond tour dates, and a freshly inked take care of XL Recordings, although he’s grow to be skeptical of such standard measures of success. “That is now an extension of my labor,” he stated in a current interview. “It’s one other model of working at Entire Meals, simply, like, so much cooler.” Nourished by Time’s newest EP, Catching Chickens, expands upon Erotic Probiotic 2’s sprawling, singular universe whereas additionally hinting at new sounds, shapes, and textures he may discover down the street. As ever, incisive political insights and poignant feelings shine by the mutant style melds, reaffirming the sneakily transgressive nature of Brown’s method to pop.
At its finest, Catching Chickens subverts playful, exuberant moods with biting social commentary. On opener “Hell of a Experience,” Brown laments the ills of late-stage capitalism over ’80s dance euphoria: “Kids caught within the matrix/They know when it’s fiction/Younger, inhaling them toxins/Used to have a 3rd place now they bought no choices.” After the refrain (“the purple, the blue, and even the white… by no means felt like mine”), the tune dissolves into hole guitars and warbling synths, sketching an ambiguous sonic image of what societal collapse may really feel like: terrifying but cathartic, isolating but inspiring. Lead single “Hand on Me” bops with stretchy synths and vocal harmonies, detailing a forlorn but impassioned love—romantic or in any other case—that’s each comforting and psychosis-inducing. These songs mirror Brown’s uncanny skill to sofa advanced subject material in pleasant DIY pop. He by no means strains to mesh type with content material; as a substitute, the 2 are at all times inextricably and effortlessly linked.
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