Halfway by “BABY BABY,” a spotlight of the wonderful new Nourished by Time report, there’s a sudden, descending synth swell, coupled with a delirious groan: Child, child, child, child, child, child! This chorus, “child, child,” is the centerpiece of the music, and to date, it has been mellow: a muttered coo, spoken like a groggy lover. As a vocalist, Marcus Brown is dynamic and world-weary, his elastic vary spanning the hope and heartbreak of life in a withering empire. Weightless as his music might sound, it’s burdened by capitalist rot, which is what makes it wrenching—pinpointing the exact second you notice, like many People, that you’re fucked. This despair floods “BABY BABY,” and at this particular juncture, when he trades his mutter for a moan, it curdles into one thing agonizing. Now not tender, “child, child” turns into a cry for mercy: the tipping level between having the whole lot and having it taken from you.
Brown, an outspoken 31 12 months outdated from Baltimore, makes music for the issues our dystopia steals from us. The moniker “Nourished by Time,” which borrows from “Guided by Voices,” is a press release of course of: a “reminder,” Brown defined final 12 months, “that when you put your power and put your love and coronary heart into one thing, it has no selection however to bloom.” As in his music, there’s a bleak subtext to this lovely sentiment. Vitality, love, and coronary heart—human issues—are incompatible with late-stage capitalism, a system the place time is just not nurtured, however floor, together with folks, into revenue. His debut, 2023’s Erotic Probiotic 2, had a mournful varnish, a memorial service for hopes crushed and dragged away on conveyor belts. On “Staff Interlude,” when he pleaded “Don’t make me wait so lengthy,” it felt like a meta-commentary: For Black, working-class People, time might by no means arrive to nourish you in any respect.
The historical past of revolution, in America, is peppered with cries of Wait! Be affected person with the system. Brown’s music is inextricable from this historical past, which just about makes “Nourished by Time” really feel winking, sarcastic. The sensation is extra biting than ever on The Passionate Ones, whose titular characters, weary of ready, wrestle for his or her humanity in a dehumanizing period. Not like Brown’s prior releases, The Passionate Ones renders oppression as materially dirty, earthbound, suffocating. The place Erotic Probiotic 2 was hypnagogic in spirit—drawing from ’80s pastiche, sports-television samples, echo-heavy harmonies—this LP foregrounds rawer, extra bodily parts, with out sacrificing Brown’s booming, atmospheric textures. For a musician so adept at concocting dreamscapes, this renewed iteration of post-R&B, punk-tinged and apoplectic, feels bluntly anti-escapist, as if to say: No, this isn’t music to dissociate to. These occasions name for urgency.
