“It felt good to be rebelling against the typical view of what an artists is today, a curator,” he says. Cosmic escapes and disco rhythms speak to developing new vocabulary, while Nielson’s vocals reach powerful new heights. The new songs channel the spirit of psych innovators without ignoring the last 40 years of music, forming a flowing, cohesive whole that reflects restless creativity. Multi-Love adds dimensions to the band’s already kaleidoscopic approach, with Nielson exploring a newfound appreciation for synthesizers. Where Nielson addressed the pain of being alone on II, Multi-Love takes on the complications of being together. On Multi-Love, Unknown Mortal Orchestra frontman and multi-instrumentalist Ruban Nielson reflects on relationships: airy, humid longing, loss, the geometry of desire that occurs when three people align. The threads of our past never unravel, they hover like invisible webs, occasionally glistening due to a sly angle of the sun. You can construct & paint the objects in space to stretch them in any direction, to create infinitely vast compositional spaces.” The virtual space allows for most 3D objects to trail in time – based on the directions one moves. In the words of the director Lionel Williams: “It is meant to represent the vacuum of space by impressing upon inter-dimensional unfolding, immaterial objects, and time-driven reverberation of events.
Unknown Mortal Orchestra have unveiled a video game to coincide with the release of their latest video, Multi-Love. Perhaps Neilson's throat chakra tattoo blinks open and shut mumbling into a Dictaphone one minute, communicating eloquently the next.NEW ALBUM 'Multi-Love' Friday 22 May on JAGJAGUWAR The instantly lovable So Good at Being in Trouble is, once again, breezy and downhearted ("She was so good at being in trouble/ So bad at being in love," it sighs) elsewhere, there are wah-pedal workouts such as One at a Time, in which some brass joins the hairy be-in. Unknown Mortal's secret weapon, though, is a kind of fried funk that grounds even Nielson's most whimsical passages. But as II unfurls, there are longueurs where Nielson can get a little vague and inward-directed. To impugn such a fundamentally glazed record for losing focus as it nears the out-groove is a little like berating a shark for being snaggle-toothed. The guitar melody showcases what an uncommonly pristine player this former garage punk can be. A blissed-out plea for a state of suspended animation that's not far off death, the single's cover art features the bloodied face of a baby (presumably Nielson's youngest). Swim and Sleep (Like a Shark), the album's first single, also conjoins sleep, prettiness and unease. Rather, he is homesick and lonely and partying a little more than is necessary: "I'm so tired/ But I can never lay down my head," he rues. The scritching acoustic guitar is intimate and the melody quite beatific, but Neilson isn't toting a flowers-in-the-hair version of the 60s ideal. "Isolation/ It can put a gun in your hand," chorus a number of Nielsons, multitracked into a kind of queasy harmony on From the Sun. Neilson – then working a nine to five – posted an anonymous song online in 2010, only to have Ffunny Ffrends blow up in the blogosphere, a heady sequence of events which led to that napkin in that bar.īy contrast, II (released on a new label) was constructed in snatches on phones while Neilson, having assembled a band, played its predecessor around the world in the elevated company of bands such as Grizzly Bear. That bedroom recording came to renown in a very 21st-century way, however.
We're living through unexpectedly tie-dyed times in American rock music (cf Ariel Pink, Animal Collective et al) Neilson's debut, 2011's Unknown Mortal Orchestra, was dazed, raw and melodic, earning it a great many plaudits.
His past in a punk band (New Zealand's Mint Chicks) irrupts only occasionally into Unknown Mortal Orchestra's gently lysergic pop songs – songs that seem to just get better and better, refracting both the Beatles and Led Zeppelin along with gnarlier psych fare. Like fellow Antipodeans Tame Impala, and like fellow west coasters Ariel Pink and Ty Segall (plus forthcoming tourmates Foxygen), Nielson is, undoubtedly, a time-lagged child of the psychedelic era a mind-alteration lifer. "I eat fried chicken on the road," he avows. Somewhat surprisingly, the 32-year-old New Zealand-born, Oregon-dwelling musician claimed to music website Pitchfork recently that he is not a hippy This, despite his wife and two children having lived in a midwife's yurt for a time, and despite Nielson having the kind of freewheeling attitude to life management that saw him sign a record deal on a napkin in a bar. Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Nielson has a tattoo of an eye on his neck – specifically, on his throat chakra, said to rule communication.