Ensoulment by The The
Matt Johnson, the one constant member and creative force of English musical collective The The, is as flinty an observer and chronicler as Tom Waits or Nick Cave. He is also as darkly compassionate and as wryly self-aware as they are, and Ensoulment, The The’s first full-length since 2000’s NakedSelf, proves that Johnson hasn’t let his insight grow dim.
The 24 years between The The albums have provided an abundance of changes on which to focus; that passage of time has also deepened the voice through which Johnson expresses his dark sense of the world.
As ever, the music reflects this darkness in ways that are contemporary without becoming too modern: Johnson and co-producer/engineer Warne Livesey, who also worked on The The’s 1986 and 1989 albums Infected and Mind Bomb, smoothly adapt pop touches and rock instrumentation to songs that create a kind of postmodern blues.
The results can be sardonically grim: a soft stomp and low bass guitar link with melodically dramatic electro-funk showmanship to make “Zen & the Art of Dating” an alternately pitiless and sympathetic overview of 21st-century, app-driven “romance,” while phantoms of fiddle and horns feed the paranoid grumbling and uneasy electric strumming of “Linoleum Smooth to the Stockinged Foot.”
Johnson can lunge into obviousness, as he does with the title and everything else about “Kissing the Ring of POTUS,” but he’s more frequently subtle, such as when he revamps the overall dirge of “The House of the Rising Sun” into an almost welcoming prediction of the fall of Albion in “Some Days I Drink My Coffee by the Grave of William Blake.”
Yet The The conveys hope with as much conviction as it communicates doom, and tracks like the piano-based “I Want to Wake Up with You” and the energetically Dire Straitsian “A Rainy Day in May” offer the memory and possibility of companionable love. More than a comeback, Ensoulment stands as a bleakly beautiful bulwark against depersonalization.
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