Those who have followed Benjamin Shaw over the years will have come to expect the unexpected. From Guppy back in 2015, he has established an experimental style, drawing on a variety of genres alongside spoken samples and field recordings to conjure atmospheric and often despondent soundscapes. But what we’ve really come to appreciate is his uncanny ability to rise above the sad and the bleak via an immersion in those very experiences, and without the mawkish everything-is-okay-in-the-end aftertaste. “Perhaps the defining characteristics of Shaw’s music is its ability to transcend its own themes,” we wrote of 2018’s Megadead, a record which started a journey out into brighter, poppier territory. “He may be singing about hating his job, about going nowhere fast, but in doing so colours these things with meaning. To create art is to communicate, and as such the songs represent the antithesis to their own concerns, the simulated happiness and artificial connection punctured through their ironic presence.”
Since adopting Megadead as a moniker, Shaw continued this project with an increasingly experimental hand. A couple of EPs last year established the project’s willingness to push further beyond the confines of previous work, and Shaw’s output in 2021 has been no less ambitious. Take 31 Songs About Murder, a collection which drew on ambient, electronic and hip hop to create a collection of cinematic vapourwave snippets which sampled the murder mystery shows from an old timey radio station. What Shaw described as “mini bops, half songs, and top drawer bangers,” all based on killing.
This month, Shaw returned with what he describes as the “first proper Megadead album,” Authentic Country Music. But true to Megadead’s subversive spirit, it turns out authentic country music doesn’t involve banjos or pedal steel, at least not directly. Instead Shaw has dug through a plethora of crates to build up a library of samples, then matched these with idiosyncratic pop and trip hop beats, weaving a vivid plunderphonic patchwork. A sound a world away from the dismal depressed pop which made Benjamin Shaw’s name, and one all the more triumphant for it.
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The expansive ‘Lo, We Are Bound!” introduces this new widescreen sound, swirling with all the lofty mystery and insistent drama of an made-for-TV eighties documentary, or Oneohtrix Point Never’s soundtrack to Uncut Gems. Effervescent electronics introduce ‘Chief of the Dead’, infusing the track with a kind of infectious energy which lasts across its sidewinding length even as the track spits and spins in different directions, before ‘The Murder Card’ gives the first taste of bona fide country music, albeit of the Scandinavian variety.
‘It goes / It gone’ continues the televisual aesthetic, its moody noir tones and pressing electronics playing like the opening credit sequence of the coolest PI show you’ve never seen. ‘She protec but she also attac’ is equal parts horror soundtrack and nineties hip hop chill bop, while ‘Country Music!’ rolls the dice and throws another combination together, emerging as a kind of European dance hit. Closer ‘Dead Metal’ is equally off-the-wall, a prog/psych hybrid which builds through strange and portentous vibes but ends up vast and affirming.
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More than experiments in genre, each of the songs furthers Shaw’s thematic concerns. Take standout ‘Out Spaced’, a track which lives up to its title with cosmic beats interspersed by spoken samples regarding the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Not only is it a fantastic example of Shaw’s playful sensibilities, it’s a continuation of the classic Shaw theme. For while the juxtaposition of transportive sounds and down-to-earth charm capture an entertaining humour, there’s something heart-breaking too. A lesson in imagination which conjures a collective failure of that very quality, or else a willingness to submit too readily to its escape.
The result is to situate the listener away from the presented population. To invoke a sense of remove from others, a distance that can never quite be bridged. A fact Megadead might approach more obliquely, but approaches all the same. Which is to say, the turn to pop and prog is not some triumph over the prior gloom, rather the logical progression of a lasting condition. If Benjamin Shaw’s oeuvre represents a picture of an artist positioned at an angle to the world, then Authentic Country Music finds them having retired all hopes of fitting in. So why not redirect those energies, and start to have some fun?
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Authentic Country Music is out now and available from the Megadead Bandcamp page.