Sonic Boom :: All Things Being Equal

The first Sonic Boom album in thirty years finds Peter Kember reemerging, paradoxically, at the height of his influence. While the grandiose space-rock frontsmanship of his erstwhile Spacemen 3 partner Jason Pierce has faded somewhat into the safety of the adult contemporary rotation, the seeds Kember has scattered as experimenter, heteronymous collaborator, and champion of analog synthesizers seem finally to be bearing their full fruit. Production work on albums by Peaking Lights, Moon Duo, and Sun Araw only served to emphasize the reality that today’s rhizomatic, electro-curious, definitively post-rock landscape takes its lineage not from J Spaceman, but Sonic Boom. In 2020, it’s Kember’s sound-world, the rest of us are just living in it.

As it turns out, living in it—and living harmoniously—is just what he had in mind. All Things Being Equal is Kember’s most accessible work to date, a diaphanous song cycle of rich, pleasurable electronic meditations on the meeting of inner and outer space. Mind expansion is on the agenda from the outset on the Spiegel-esque “Just Imagine,” sequencers chomping and arpeggiators awhirl. “Just imagine how it could be,” Kember drones, “Just imagine you’re a tree.”

Imagine indeed. From here, the vision quest proceeds at a similar pulse, if a variable pace. “Just a Little Piece of Me” and “Things Like This (A Little Bit Deeper)” form, together with the opener, a suite of impressions from a close encounter with plant life, with nods to the Krishna consciousness of George Harrison and the eco-consciousness of Surf’s Up-era Beach Boys. As the Brian Wilson acolyte of standing, Panda Bear is the natural fit to round out the dialogue, shoring up Kember’s metallic monotone with his own angelic, slow-crashing guest vocals on the former, before the latter builds to its blissed-out crescendo.

Kember’s work with Panda Bear, particularly on 2015’s sublime …Meets the Grim Reaper, marked an aesthetic about-face (perhaps inspired by the verdure of Portugual, which both now call home) that found the stark, even jagged textures of his earlier work, all at once, foliating into humid, intricate topographies. All Things Being Equal develops that approach: while the song structures are simpler, the arrangements are somehow even more saturated. The result feels less like evolution than fermentation: weird, boggy, and teeming with life.

For some, the unassuming lyrics that punctuate these soundscapes may seem, at best, like distractions; at worst, like cheap decals on a fine, abstract canvas. But what turns of phrase like, “Make it about the way that you live, / Make it about the love that you give,” lack in profundity, they make up in universality. Mantra-like repetition is a hallmark of Kember’s from his earliest electronic works, a debt of influence he owes above all to Kraftwerk (one acknowledged in all but name on “Tawkin Techno”) but for those open to the effect, its introspective simplicity can work, here and there, in mutually affirming tandem with his electronic rhythms, and open—like a key in a lock—a deeper, almost devotional listening,

This is baroque chill-out music, made not to be danced to so much as swayed in unconscious harmonic motion. Clocking in at just under an hour, All Things Being Equal splits evenly into two halves, but its woozy equilibrium lends itself to a looping that amplifies its strengths. The melancholy of “On a Summer’s Day,” or the anticipatory hope of “I Feel a Change Coming On,” are embedded in the music, waiting for us when we return. In aspiring to capture the organic, Kember’s electronics have replicated and fused with their subjects. This is cyborg music at its most optimistic.

The particular reasons for that optimism are less forthcoming. “I see dark clouds ahead, / I hope it’s only bringing rain,” the final lines of album closer “Change” are the album’s only allusion societal unease, and an indeterminate one at that. What prevails instead is the mellow agape of greying hippies (or in this case ravers), and a preoccupation with visionary individualism characteristic of the ethos of the New Age. The album’s two most dissonant tracks—“My Echo, My Shadow, and Me” and “I Can See The Light Bend”—muster their sturm und drang in visions of Nietzschean revelation rather than societal upheaval.

Even at its most punk, Spacemen 3’s revolutionary spirit was, itself, a form of nostalgia—this time for the counter-culture of the sixties. Here, a longing for childhood innocence, or a virginal, pre-industrial world (“Imagine your long lost friend, / Imagine seeing them again, / Imagine all the places that change, / Imagine they came back again.”) might also encode a longing for withdrawal from politics, into the space of myth. In interviews, Kember has expressed a passion for environmental defense, but All Things Being Equal is not an activist record. Instead, it is an offer of escape into a vivid and intoxicating simulacrum, a vision of utopia. Turn on, tune in, drop out.

Escape is a legitimate and (these days, frequently) welcome recourse for art. But utopia is a political matter, as much for who gets to escape as who doesn’t. There may be a time when the world feels less calamitous, but at this moment it does not feel like a lapse of criticism to hold the formidable sound-world Sonic Boom has conjured in relief with the world to which its listeners must always return, a world in desperate need of re-making, but also of music to face up to it. “Just imagine what it will be…” It’s easy if you try, but maybe all too easy. words / r meehan

Related: Sonic Boom :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

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