Unknown Mortal Orchestra: "Multi-Love"

The progression of Unknown Mortal Orchestra could work as science fiction—alien entity crashes to earth, progressively exhibits human emotions to fascinated onlookers. By the time the Portland band released their debut in 2011, Ruban Nielson had dropped the anonymity ploy; the lo-fi production was next to go on II. Judging from “Multi-Love”, UMO is threatening to do away with the six-string wizardry that often distinguished them but also occasionally bogged down their otherwise taut, psych-funk songwriting. And so there’s less than ever standing between the listener and what lay at the core of previous standouts “How Can U Luv Me” and “Swim and Sleep (Like a Shark)”—a very, very bummed guy and his record collection.

On “Multi-Love”, Nielson sings of the titular entity crashing his heart and trashing it like a hotel room—a common rock’n’roll image that hasn’t quite been used this way, and those are the most powerful ones. Whatever “multi-love” might be, they had all the fun knowing Nielson would be responsible for paying the bill. This metaphor fits in a musical sense as well: as a melodicist and an arranger, Nielson is constantly trying to fit odd, cracked parts back together, and this is his most complex display of craftsmanship yet, keeping a falsetto and newfound synth fetish in line with brisk breakbeats, while doing a damage assessment of his broken heart—revealing that UMO have always been a funk band in both senses of the word.

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