Clarence Clarity

The album No Now (2015) reiterated his skills at crafting infectiously catchy hooks while vivisecting the instrumental counterpoint and recombining the snippets. His specialty is hazardous ballads like Will To Believe and especially Buck-Toothed Particle Smashers, a carillon drenched in his typical chaos of sampling, detours, sound effects and vocal mutations. There are more infectious singalongs and rhythms, like Meadow Hopping Traffic Stopping Death Splash and 1-800-WORSHIP, and more trivial melodies and rhythms, like Let's Shoot Up and Porn Mountain. While his eccentric genius is more diluted in the album than in the previous EPs, there are still plenty of eccentric moments. For example, CancerT In The Water hipnotically repeats the same line over and over again, with minimal variations in the accompaniment. There are also several brief interludes, even the pure noise collage of Hit Factory Of Sadness. The album also includes Alive In The Septic Tank, Off My Grid, Those Who Can't Cheat and The Gospel Truth that appeared on the EPs. Towards the end the album begins to sound repetitive and run out of ideas, but it was since the time of Prince that a dance-soul album didn't contain so many catchy refrains.

Think Peace (2018) compiles the singles released between 2016 and 2018. Gone are the cubistic experiments. Most of them are tedious soul ballads like Adam & the Evil, Naysayer Magick Obeyer and Vapid Feels Ain't Vapid, but there is still room for bizarre songs like the surrealistic synth-pop ditty We Change and the limping aquatic semi-rapped Fold 'Em/ Silver Lake Reservoir, both worthy of a musichall skit. Among the mainstream products, Next Best Thing is particularly bouncy and infectious. If they are wrapped in much simpler candy paper, the number of melodic concoctions remains impressive.