Photo: Bandcamp
It’s nice to feel challenged by music occasionally, which is how I felt when I encountered New Jersey musician Mk.gee. Even his pseudonym feels youthful, and while he’s synthesising influences familiar to most music fans, the way they’re assembled and aurally treated feels very 2020s.
Michael Todd Gordon is 26 years old, and while his debut, Two Star and the Dream Police, features plenty of synth and other accoutrements, he’s first and foremost a guitarist, citing players like Jimi Hendrix, Prince, and Taj Mahal as primary influences.
That’s not immediately apparent, and on songs like ‘Alesis’, there’s nary a chord to be heard. Gordon’s vocal style seems indebted to RnB, and likewise, many of these compositions are stripped to the bone.
Listen to the restraint on a track like ‘I Want’, and the power it gains from keeping his finely tuned melodies at an even keel.
At a certain point, lo-fi aesthetics entered the mainstream. Billie Eilish records her albums at home, sometimes in untreated rooms, and you would never know, but other artists embraced the limitations of location audio and turned them into strengths.
Two New Zealand acts who spring to mind are Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Connan Mockasin, both striving for intentionally imperfect sonics. Mockasin was an influence on Steve Lacey, whose guitar sound is similarly squeezed.
I can feel the presence of all these artists in the way Mk.gee’s palette is flattened, so that each element smears into another. Years ago a local mastering engineer told me that his younger clientele kept requesting a thinner tone, and he realised they consumed music largely through laptop speakers and ear buds, and were looking to emulate it. That anecdote sprang to mind while listening to this album.
Songs like ‘Are You Looking Up’ give a good sense of Mk.gee’s talents on the guitar, and it’s one where his voice emerges prominently. The artist that first sprang to mind when I heard him was Frank Ocean, and sure enough, he’s a fan. It goes both ways: Ocean played the younger musician on his radio show. But while the influence of RnB is heavy, Mk.gee perhaps shuns its perfection, opting instead for spontaneity.
On first listen Two Star and the Dream Police felt like it was keeping me at arm's length, in the way vocals tend to duck in and out, and every instrument seems elusive. But rather than put me off, it offered a puzzle to be solved, and sure enough a keen sense of pop structure and melody emerged. There’s an air of indifference here too; you get the sense that Mk.gee wants you to come to him, rather than the other way around.
