For the first minute or two, Kirin J. Callinan’s sophomore album sounds like it might be a reasonable follow-up to Embracism, which is one of the more underrated albums of 2013. For his debut, Callinan meshed art pop and dark electro-industrial music together and gave it an unmistakable garnish: his yowling vocals. Callinan stammers and roars on his songs, blurting out non-sequitirs and repeating garbled lines with a ferocity that recalls fellow Australian wild-man Nick Cave. His lyrics match that violent intimacy, resplendent with male sexual energy and insecurity.
“My Moment,” the first song on Bravado, seems to trace the same path, with a ping-ponging synth line and unsettling atmospheric touches as Callinan drawls in his sleazy baritone. The song lumbers to life like an animal waking up. But when it finally explodes, about two-and-a-half minutes in, it’s not with squealing dissonance or full-band rocking like you’d get on Embracism: it’s with a Europop beat drop. It sounds like something PC Music would put out! In one moment, it obliterates the idea that Callinan would continue or refine the sound of Embracism; instead he’s taken a hard left, picked up a sense of humor, and become an utter troll.
That’s certainly how I found out about him, just a few days ago. A clip from the music video of “Big Enough,” one of the singles from Bravado, is getting passed around Tumblr right now. In it, we roam through shots of the Australian landscape as a woman whistles a plaintive melody, before panning up to the sky and seeing… a giant phantasm of a man (Australian hard rocker Jimmy Barnes) dressed in cowboy garb screaming over the empty plains. Please, I implore you to watch that whole video, because if you’re anything like me, you will feel an indescribable joy at the absurdity of it. It doesn’t even matter whether you know it’s not serious – the video is such a perfect encapsulation of the kitschy Eurovision aesthetic that it transcends needing to be a joke or not.
And that’s the modus operandi of Bravado – it tackles and defamiliarizes many different genres, but Callinan’s quirks override them all in ways that are just slightly uncomfortable and unfitting. He reminds me of Perfume Genius in the way his songs seem to slough over, not quite fitting the boxes he makes for them. The album’s lead single “S.A.D.” (“Song About Drugs”) juxtaposes the anthemic 80s synthpop production with lyrics about getting “a lungful of dope smoke” and being “wrapped up in plastic.” But the music goes further, complimenting every line with a squeamish pitch-shifted harmony vocal and letting Callinan indulge in spoken-word sections. Even the fist-in-the-air chorus constantly throws you off-balance by modulating the key up and down every other line. Often this sloppy discomfort expresses itself in the lyrics: “Down 2 Hang” carries itself on a series of increasingly disturbing metaphors for how “she’s down to hang.” First “like gliders in the sky… or sneakers on a wire” but then like “an asphyxiated man with a belt in a van, his dick in his hand / Like Jesus, she is down to hang.” Right after that, “Living Each Day” encourages listeners to “live each day like it’s your last one,” but Callinan’s version of doing that means that he must “shrug off the urge to systematically kill.”
It’s all funny, of course, but it would be moot if Callinan didn’t bring some good songs to the table. If this was just an album of genre parodies, it wouldn’t be worth much more than a new Lonely Island album. “Living Each Day” lopes around with a bouncy bassline and dead-simple guitar hook. The dance tracks like “My Moment” and “Big Enough” may be silly, but they’re also ebullient and likeable.
Over the first five gobsmackingly weird and funny songs on Bravado, Callinan rewrites your brain so much that it sounds mystifying and unfitting when he starts taking himself seriously. The second half of the album is, by and large, straightforward sophisti-pop songs. There’s hardly a trace of humor in songs like “Family Home,” a touching tune about childhood friends and growing up in difficult circumstances. The only trace of the first half’s energy is “This Whole Town,” which has the EDM dance stylings but very little of the humor. Granted, the closing track “Bravado” manages to transcend all that – it’s a genuinely beautiful confessional little synthpop song. Taken as a single and music video alongside the other music videos from this album (“S.A.D.,” “Living Each Day,” “Big Enough”) it obliquely passes comment on those genre parodies – “After all this time / It was all bravado.” I suspect I’ll be replaying and loving this one more than any of the other songs on the album in the coming months. It would be such a touching end to the album… if only Callinan hadn’t intentionally decided to be touching halfway through with all those other songs.
What you get on Bravado, then, is one half of two different records sutured together. The first half is a head-expanding cavalcade of delightfully trashy/disturbing satire, while the second half is an 80s-inspired sophisti-pop record. The problem is that the first half commits to such a dizzying aesthetic extremism that, without any tip of the hand to show why these two opposites go together, the actually-pretty-good second half sounds dull and out-of-place. I still recommend the first half to anyone with an interest in the gonzo, cheesy, or ill-advised. On those songs, Callinan confidently steps forward with every bad idea he can muster. It’s a shame that he can’t commit to those bad ideas for a whole album.
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