Look Back On This Time

Tune-Yards “Sometime”

“Sometime” is built on a beat that’s steady and forceful but has a loose bounce to it, like someone dribbling a basketball down the court. The bass sounds slippery and sneaky, like it’s trying to hide behind the beat but it’s far too big to be obscured by it. In all this, there’s Merril Garbus’ voice, or more accurately, her voices – the high end swirling and soaring like gusts of wind, the low end more closely tethered to the rhythm, not quite rapping. The aesthetic is very recognizable as Tune-Yards but with anything that would register as “twee” removed so it’s reduced to blunt rhythm and a thin atmosphere of harmony. I was a little put off by the extreme neuroses of the more recent Tune-Yards records but “Sometime” seems to be reacting against that somewhat as Garbus sings about developing a sense of historical context for the present, confronting the uselessness of a reflexive pessimism about the state of the world, and being able to forgive yourself for your complicity in bad things without necessarily letting yourself off the hook.

Buy it from Bandcamp.