There’s something about posthumous releases. I didn’t watch Amazing Grace — though it physically pained me — and something in me can’t quite relax into Prince‘s work on Spotify.
In both cases the artist had work that was theirs, which they didn’t want presented and profited from in a certain way. And the people who decide these things waited until they were dead and, and almost immediately did it anyway.
Few of us are afforded the dignity of true autonomy over our labour — but if Prince and Aretha Franklin hadn’t earned that right, then maybe none of us will.
All of which is a long way of saying Mac Miller‘s Circles was working against a certain amount of inbuilt suspicion.
But — to the extent that any art completed and released after the holder of the byline is dead can — Circles addresses those suspicions. It is neither a cynical cash-in, nor is it ghoulish and exploitative, the aural equivalent glance at a depressed man’s last diary entries.
It starts with that voice. One of the most consistent difficulties of writing about depression is putting across how dispiritingly mundane it can become. As such, Miller’s drowsy melodicism communicates something words on their own rarely do.
Which is not to say the lyrics on Circles are artless. By pitching his experience in the everyday/conversational/matter-of-fact, he keeps the desperation quiet (Running out of gas, hardly anything left, hope I make it home from work), the resignation rueful (Some people say they want to live forever, that’s way too long, I’ll just get through the day) and the abyss forever only just off screen (That’s what it look like, right before you fall).
Across the length of Circles depression is a drag, a hassle, a source of exhaustion. Which after long enough — in one experience — is what it gets to be. The most actively sad Miller sounds is on his cover of Love front man Arthur Lee’s Everybody’s Gotta Live (just Everybody here) — the bounce, the “whattayagonnado?” shrug of the original is gone, and replaced by something anxious, insistent piano and Miller’s voice shifted into a frail upper register.
The most convincing, palpable reference to a life beyond the endurance of the present is left to the album’s one guest, Melbourne’s own Baro Sura, crooning about turning jeans into hand-me-downs. Contrasted with Miller who, here and elsewhere, seems to view intimacy as just series of occasions to apologise, it may be the album’s sad, lovely peak.
Circles is as much a soul album as it is a hip hop record. In the hands of the peerless Jon Brion, the aesthetic is velvety and sedate at the bottom and at the top (though it’s a few listens before you hear them) there are glistening bells, bright, gently pulsing synths, faint and weary and diffuse like street lights fighting through fog.
It’s not quite a perfect record — there’s no bad tracks, but the persistently somnambulant tone means the beauty of later tracks like Surf feels buried in the mix — but it’s close; a cohesive, joined up vision that never once betrays the fractured circumstances of its creation.
Which of course, makes it all the sadder.
Dancing to Architecture 