Check out songs here: http://www.myspace.com/milesbenjaminanthonyrobinson

For MBAR, it’s difficult to tell whether prolonged exposure is necessarily a good thing. Towards the tail end of the album, his rickety, splitting-at-the-seams compositions start to lose some of their punch, tracks like ‘Mountineer’d’ and ‘Above the Sun’ seem to lose their appeal a little more every time you hear them. By this stage Robinson’s world-weary, drug-addled themes have started wear a little thin, and though that probably makes a brilliant meta-textual conceptual point about the down-and-out life of a beatnik drug addict, it doesn’t entirely make for enjoyable listening.

Prior to the come-down that is the closing three tracks though, comes the awesome high. Lyrically, Robinson is like the dark side of the Hold Steady, and hope is a hard thing to come across. When he sings on ‘The Debtor’ “I’m not sure that I wanna stay alive / It’s so expensive, you could die,” there’s an overwhelming sense that Robinson knows the feeling all too intimately. The knowledge that the record’s production involved both Kyp Malone of TVotR, and Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear, betrays a lot about the musical styles present here, and though the title might suggest this is a Robinson solo project (albeit from a man with enough names for four people), at no point does MBAR sound like the work of just one man.

Never is that more true than on opener ‘Buriedfed’, a song which chronicles Robinson’s time living homeless in New York City. Though Robinson himself has described the constant mention of his homeless days as “the unshakable stench of cliche” it is important to note. Without the knowledge, lines such as “fuck you I wanted just to die” seem trite and exploitative. Instead, they’re fucking brilliant. And so, in the discussion of whether time has stood by MBAR, the answer is a resounding “yes”, even if we only take into account ‘Buriedfed.’ The more I hear the song the more I’m convinced it’s the best song released last year, and is easily in the best of the decade. From quiet beginnings, the song goes to the very depths of Robinson’s experiences, it’s rough and ramshackle breakdown doing everything to musically evoke MBAR’s lyrics. It’s the sound of the lowest you’ve ever been, and that’s not half as low as MBAR has. Without meaning to sound hyperbolic, not since Allen Ginsberg’s Howl has the down-and-out life been represented with such bleak brilliance.

The only problem, then, is that the rest of the album struggles to live up to the opening promise. There’s undeniable class later on, and the whole album is strong, but I can’t help but almost feel that the final nine tracks would have been more impressive if not for their inability to escape the shadow of the opening track. It’s still an album that I can’t help but recommend.

(thelineofbestfit.com)

This item isn't currently available.