Right. I’ve tried to pull myself out of this review, but I absolutely cannot. Someone must stand here, on this hill, with this rose and these thorns and this blood. My hot take boils down to this:
What do the record collectors (read: certain dudes) want out of Ought? They seek an increase of the chaos, monologues and tempests to obfuscate humanity and push farther into the stratosphere of the obscure (or just the back catalogue of the Fall). For them, music carries no psychic impact – or, if it does, that doesn’t figure into the physical/objective standards by which such carpentry should abide by. The shift from Montreal’s experimental boutique Constellation to everyman indie showroom Merge worries them, as if popularity would diminish the final product.
On Room Inside the World—Ought’s third album and their first for Merge—growing up doesn’t mean mellowing out so much as it means learning to pay attention, listening carefully and openly, staying somewhere long enough to really understand where you are. Recorded at Rare Book Room in Brooklyn with producer Nicolas Vernhes (Deerhunter, Animal Collective, Silver Jews), Room Inside the World explores themes that have always concerned the band—identity, connection, survival in a precarious world—but with a bolder, more nuanced sound palette. Vibraphone, justly intonated synthesizers, drum machines, and a 70-piece choir suffuse the precise post-punk breakdowns that spangled Ought’s first two albums, giving rise to an emotional complexity that pushes their characteristically taut sound to greater depths.