Be Good The Crazy Boys

ディスコ、ワールド・ミュージック、ダブ、コスミッシェ・ムジークからニューウェイヴ、ポストパンクまでミニマルな感覚とエクスペリメンタルなテイストを隠し味にオリジナリティ溢れるダンス・ミュージックを追求する米NYブルックリンのバンド、ヒア・ウィ・ゴー・マジックのフロントマン、ルーク・テンプルによるプロジェクトがニューアルバムをリリース。
前2作品とは異なり、フルバンド編成にてスタジオ・ライヴ・レコーディングされた作品。トーキング・ヘッズばりの雑食性豊かなグルーヴ、またオインゴ・ボインゴも彷彿させる内容です。

After living in New York for two decades and releasing four albums with his Brooklyn-based band Here We Go Magic, Luke Temple relocated to rural Northern California circa 2016 and, while continuing to release the occasional solo material under his own name, he introduced an alter ego, Art Feynman. An entirely solo endeavor -- at least at first -- Feynman, a self-proclaimed animist, offered up harlequin fare that combined influences spanning folk, worldbeat, Krautrock, psychedelic pop, and more. Temple continues in that vein on his third Art Feynman album, Be Good the Crazy Boys, but with notable updates to his approach. Most significantly, after around six years of living in relative isolation, Temple moved south to Los Angeles and ultimately recorded Be Good the Crazy Boys live in the studio with a band and with Robert Shelton acting as engineer and co-producer (and synth player). In addition, the album was heavily inspired by records tracked at the now defunct Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas in and around the 1980s, among them Talking Heads Remain in Light, Lizzy Mercier Desclouxs Mambo Nassau, and Grace Jones Private Life. The Talking Heads influence is conspicuous on songs including "Therapy at 3pm" ("If I can remember!"), a kinetic, bass-guided art pop song delivered with a David Byrne-like patter, saxophone solo, and plenty of anxiety. Elsewhere, David Bowie is evoked in the chorus of the funky, also saxophone-injected "He Dances Light," although musical reference points here are sometimes as fleeting as they are ever-present, and the playfully idiosyncratic Feynman always sounds like Feynman. If anything unifies the album apart from its influences and Temples distinctive musical voice, its anxiety, with nervous energy apparent even on a song like the freewheeling, Caribbean-infused "Desperately Free," in which the adverb does the heavy lifting. The album closes on its most solemn entry, "I Do," a chorus-backed, piano-anchored love song with disquieted nods to the realities of contemporary society: "Shall we divine a new poverty line/Live just above it in a ray of sunshine?" ~ Marcy Donelson