I don’t know how to string this together into a coherent review, so I’m going to be posting my thoughts in a broken-up out-of-order series of observations that hopefully can at least approximate an explanation for what this thing is and why it's special.
There's a bizarre thematic tension pulling folx, full force, in dozen directions at once, but maybe most notable are the fact that a) it's a glitchy dance-pop album at its core (it has hooks for days, it's unironically hugely influenced by AJR, and it's the catchiest thing I've heard this year) and b) it's suffused with mourning. Almost every aspect seems to be adjacent to, pointing to, or otherwise connected with a kind of grief. Mark Fisher's death lurks over every facet of the work; Sophie samples pop up with the frequency of producer tags (I’d be hesitant to read too much into this, but the extensive sampling of her work alongside Can The Circle Be Unbroken does point strongly towards the emptiness left by her absence;) and obviously, JC's father is an implied presence throughout the whole thing. I’m hesitant to talk about this last point because it’s so personal and I don’t want to seem like I’m reviewing someone’s expression of grief, but knowing the context of the album with regards to JC’s father, as well as the constant quoting of Fisher's work, hangs a heavy presence of absence over the release which thrashes oddly against the tone of the albums genres.
In The Aeroplane Over the Sea is not an album about Anne Frank; her life and her story got woven into the album's free-associative dream logic along with a dozen other recurring symbols and motifs. But she does serve as a kind of thesis for the release, or at least an identifying, easily decipherable statement of its general ethos. ITAOTS is grapples with the idea that someone with as much inner beauty and spiritual strength as Anne can exist, and that millions like her do then and now, and that blind forces pave over them unthinking of the loss, alongside countless others, and both of these things coexist with utmost intensity, in both history, at the present, and within human nature itself. Folx references ITAOTS at least three times; borrowing Jeff Magnum's voice like a mask (on We Shall Overcome), sampling it (on Do I obey economic laws), and extensively semi-quoting Jeff on The death model, literally spelling out with almost comical bluntness the idea that I was writing this paragraph to point towards - [aeroplane : anne :: folx :: mark]. The album is not about him, but his ghost haunts it consistently. Aeroplane was about the universal concepts of beauty and tragedy that Anne's life and death represented to Jeff. Folx is about the concepts of alienation, loss, cultural lingering, and mourning that Mark Fisher's life and death represents now. I know that’s a bit of an oversimplification, but it approximates the situation here.
I think part of the divisive reaction to folx is because it's either a masterpiece or it's a disaster to any given listener. (Oversimplification again, but one I’m making for a reason.) If you see the pieces being laid down here (and click with the vision they pull together,) it's an endlessly rewarding, deeply felt labyrinth, a rhizomic mesh laced with dance-pop hooks to make it easier to swallow. That said, it only works as a masterpiece - it doesn’t really work as just another album. In the context of a masterwork, its extravagance makes sense, otherwise its a perplexing trainwreck if you fall on that side of its reception. Essentially, it is a self-aware masterwork and actively aims for that status; I’m reminded of Octa Sheffner’s Lux in that regard.
There's a lot of discussion surrounding it, and one thing I'm surprised to hear no one bringing up is how emotional this is. I've cried to most tracks on here at least once, and some ("Both Sides Now," "Can the Circle Be Unbroken," etc.) get me all foggy-eyed basically every time. It's entirely possible this reflects on me more so than the release, but I don't think it does. This is a go-to crying album for me.
The lyrics are unlike anything else I've heard (even ignoring the strange method of generating them, which seemed to involve a kind of mad-lib title coming first, followed by writing a song vaguely adhering to the hyperspecific perspective it creates, while working in elements of the folk song the song takes its title from.) The dissonance in the lyrics is jarring and oddly disarming. It’s about work; almost all of the lyrics here are about various forms of labor. They're about fantastic creatures and monsters engaging in actions for specific ends with a striking disconnect between the entity on hand (and sometimes the unusual action they partake in,) and the utter mundanity with which it is presented. It's like seeing a griffon working retail, with no special attention or value or anything attributed to it. It just works here. (I’ve seen discussion about whether folx is furry-related or not, and that’s not a requirement but it's a pretty succinct summary of the situation here, taken to a cartoonish extreme: an internal world populated by every form imagination can conjure, an external world that's banal and to which the internal world has little to no relation.) The lyrics are also, frankly, distressing. Most of these fantastic creatures that populate its pieces of narrative are either exploiting others, mistreating themselves, or being exploited or mistreated by others, with no sense of malice or even cruelty, just as an affectless product of their job. It's deeply dysfunctional and surreal in its sad banality. This could be read as a thinly-veiled mirror of experience of many, especially in the digital age; people are freed to internally become these alien things and internally sprawl into all the vistas of human emotion and feeling and identity, but are just human all the same, supporting those above them and clambering all over those below because what the fuck else are they supposed to do under the circumstances they are in and are forced to operate within.
The juxtaposition of silly and heavy/tragic subject matter (out-of-context MLP voice lines selected and presented out of context to mirror Fisher's ideas [the loss of potential futures, capitalism-induced guilt], Sonic the Hedgehog as parallel to Nick Land, the aforementioned fantastic monsters and their bleak labor environments, etc.) is very carefully and (IMO) tastefully used. "Cute/silly"+"edgy/dark" is a time-tested (and largely exhausted) trope, but the tense superposition of emotional states invoked here, trapped between silly and joyful and often downright shitposty, and sincerely emotional and heart-felt (if not -broken), is more than the sum of its parts and forces you to engage with the album on its own territory and with its own logic. It looks like a fucking mess outside of that logi, whereas within it, the juxtapositions work exceptionally well. Neither negates the other. The year is 202x and you hang out with your friends and do things you find fun and whatever, and all the time you know there’s looming crisis points coming in an uncertain but probably single-digit number of years, and neither negates the other.
This has nothing to do with anything else, but Take Me Home, Country Roads sounds like something from Garden of Delete by Oneohtrix Point Never. Hypergrunge isn’t dead, I guess.
The album's approach to cultural revivalism is clearly very carefully thought out and careful. It wears Mark's lamentations for a zombified culture on its sleeve, and yet constantly peruses the past for source material in a way that feels like a manic research project, drawing on each cultural pointer and weaving them into a network that sounds nothing like its source material. Most plunderphonics, sample-based works, or highly aestheticised 2020s cultural revivalist electronic albums, or basically any post-modern art that relies heavily on self-aware jabs at pre-existing culture, are equivalent to quilts in their patchwork approach. This is not derogatory, I love a lot of that stuff. I indulge in cultural pastiche often. That said, to extend the metaphor, this is a web, not a quilt. The ways it connects its gathered cultural pointers seems quantitatively different.
It's a violent, bitter, tongue-in-cheek, silly, maximalist celebration of what music can be and can make you feel, without losing sight of the sensation of slow collapse, stated or otherwise, that underscores the cultural strata all art now stems from. It's the first album produced in the 2020s that actually deals with what the decade is, and I feel confident in making a statement that bold. Maybe that's why it hit me so hard: it put into words the feelings saturating 2020s culture but which almost nobody is acknowledging or engaging with in any actual way.
There’s some Freudian concepts, I believe, about linking love and death, eros and thanatos, and the former being motivated or connected to the latter in a psychoanalytical sense. If you take the perspective that conventional love is connected with an awareness of individual death, this album seems to propose another kind of love which is connected with awareness of extinction. I have no real way to justify this, but I have a tendency to fixate on existential risk and folx seems to play with its emotional perspective in a way that seems related to that. (Maybe update or remove this part later.)
The usage of AI voices is very interesting and a tough thing to analyze. It's very tongue-in-cheek and self aware; JC and the others obviously have the skill to do all the vocals here, there's no need to put on dead (or living!) musician's voices like ghastly masks and they know it. If we're now going to be plunging into a zombified future of 90s revivals and 00s trends (and now the kids are romanticizing the 2010s in an increasingly tight loop of feedback and regurgitation) - if we're gonna be cosplaying our own recent past instead of attempting to project a meaningful future, we should deal with how ghastly that is. The discomfort of the AI voices is just what we're already doing, wearing recently dead culture's flayed skin; this just makes you actually face that fact. The voice cloned conversation with JC's "father" is a good thesis statement for their usage of voice cloning in the album: "I didn’t consent to this. You don’t have permission to use my voice. You’re talking to yourself." Shoving your words into Jeff Magnum's voice is a bizarre and offputting thing to do and friends& is acutely aware of this as they do it. It opens some questions worth considering about sampling and ownership, cultural recycling, our degree of identity with and living through the personalities of others. Vague parallels exist between the mostly public-domain folk songs the album is built around in which everyone owns them, and to what degree that extends to modern culture, and how far you can push that idea until it gets too uncanny-valley-ish. Nobody owns a folk song (at least until the influence of labels and big business, another major point here); in the current era, do you own your voice? Is it right to give up your "self" as artistic material to others, in the spirit of the folk-culture sharing of oral traditions? I don't think the main point the cloned voices are making is about AI itself (but that's definitely there - if this album has anything, it's layers,) and more so about cultural lingering (I want to say hauntology but I’m always worried I’m misusing that word,) and the degree to which past culture and media influences/infests current culture ("the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as if to haunt the present,") in both pop culture and indie music. Pitchfork and /mu/ are obviously heavy influences in friends&, JC acknowledges both, and the (slow breakdown of the) interplay between art-makers and the surrounding magazines, websites, imageboards, subcultures, etc. [unfinished part] Whenever we listen to these canonized albums, they play though us; we project our own perspectives onto the singers, and put their words into our literal mouths. This is normal and the way we've been interacting with music since forever. The stolen voices used here are an opaque and provocative way of playing with this concept, one that vaguely gestures at an array of questions and avenues of discussion but without really providing answers. I can forgive engagement-bait when it comes from a place of good intentions.
Folx is horrifying, blissful, incredibly fun, silly, the highest-effort shitpost to date, obviously heartfelt, deeply distressing, and incredibly comforting. It's a patchwork with a million pieces I will spend the next year at least tracing over. Folx is a masterpiece and I don't expect literally anyone I know to like it. JC, he would be so proud. Thank you for this.
Final thoughts: this album is a bottomless pit.
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