by B. Levinson
This collection of new work by iji's Zach Burba feels like a homecoming. It's a collage of home-studio tracks for which Burba casually incorporated friends and absorbed their worlds. It takes a bevy of styles and moods and places them under the same warm haze. Your Music lends credence to an embrace of process, method, and habit. Coming out of the production of a new iji record and side work on two excellent records — Mega Bog's recent Dolphine and Dear Nora's Skulls Example — Burba pursued an itch to let creativity take free reign and arrived at Your Music. It's a playful experience that is equally heartfelt and stimulating, clippings from a sketchbook collaged and recomposed.
Burba's musical vocabulary (when boiled down from the progressive twee pop structures written for iji) folds the chant into the jingle into the forgotten hit single. "Don't Go Messing Around" is a hymnal à la the sadly departed Daniel Johnston, here given a chipmunk voice. The song's speaker intones a love of God via a heartland-tough-guy manner of speech, teasing out a contradiction of American fundamentalist thought. This gentle voice and this sweet melody carry a threatening message — "don't go messing around with my god/ bow your punk ass down to my god" — with harmony, sincerity, and grace. Others, like “Beautiful World,” “A Fire of Thorn,” and “Observing the Orange,” feel like musical dispatches from a land and time far away, perhaps parallel to our own. Burba acts as the psychic medium transmitting these signals. The songs’ simple hooks and tidy construction give them snappy levity through their pseudo-mystical affectation. Drum machines clatter and interdimensional Casio organ sounds remain intact.
"This Resort" sports a particularly anti-capitalist snark with much of the wit and charm of the also recently departed David Berman (thinking here primarily of his Purple Mountains track “Margaritas at the Mall”). Its hook détourns a real estate marketing truism to make a bleak statement on the vacation/work cycle. The song’s speaker sits back on the refrain, sighing, "if I lived in this resort, I'd be home now." Only later do they find that, "it's creeping back into my mind, Monday visions of a daily grind/ my boss, my bills, the yard, the pills, goddamn." I personally advocate all such expressions of psychic defeat under the weight of capitalism.
“Panama City’s Dollar Outlet” best illustrates Burba’s mystical affect and casual distaste for consumerism as it draws the album towards a close with an exhaustively itemizing dollar store ad. The ad is eerily mumbled along to, echoed, and musically accompanied by a disembodied voice. This sequence is wrapped up with a brief jingle: “everything is just a dollar at the dollar outlet store." The whole event degrades into a loud blaring tone which sits somewhere between a trombone and a lawnmower as though the scene itself had malfunctioned, the site of this consumerist spectacle imploding. This is the form of surrealist, situationist collage that Burba employs. But somehow it seems they have happened upon it. The whole work seems quite casual and that works to its advantage. At the end of the day these are sweet sweet tunes worth a listen.