Unknown Mortal Orchestra – ‘V’
Auckland psych-rock innovators Unknown Mortal Orchestra have unleashed their first-ever double album, V. The bumper collection marks the group’s fifth studio album, a welcomed return from the funky rock group, who have been markedly absent in recent years with V, their first LP since 2018’s critically and commercially praised Sex & Food.
With fans left hungry for more, our anticipatory appetite was quenched in October 2022 with the announcement of a new bumper release, V. Upon a first run-through, I can confirm that all UMO fans will be delighted with this stack of tunes. It’s certainly no canapé. I hope you’re hungry because beef wellington is on the menu, my friends.
Since their humble beginnings in the north of New Zealand, the band has relocated to the US, bringing their specific Pacific sound to shake the American psych-rock foundations. The music encountered in V was conceived in Palm Springs, California, but transports the listener to the verdant coastlines of Hawaii. With a revived and vibrant evolution of the band’s known and trusted sound, the Hawaiian-New Zealand frontman and principal songwriter, Ruban Nielson, has drawn from West Coast AOR tradition to give an update on his family life in Hawaii while returning to his musical roots.
“In Hawaii, everything shifted off of me and my music,” Nielson said in a recent press release. “Suddenly, I was spending more time figuring out what others need and what my role is within my family. I also learned that things I thought were true of myself are bigger than I thought. My way of making mischief – that’s not just me – that’s my whole Polynesian side. I thought I was walking away from music to focus on family, but the two ended up connecting.”
In V, Nielson wields elements that are crucial for me to warm an album as a whole. Firstly, it is transportive: as early as the opening track, ‘The Garden’, we teleport to a tropical garden. Already, this leads me to the second winning element: there’s a variation of mood. I believe that music is as crucial to life as life is to music. Therefore, an album fraught with happiness and optimism will usually turn me away after a couple of tracks. Thankfully, UMO are well acquainted with this concept. While we might escape to ‘The Garden’ or, later in the album, ‘The Beach’, there’s always a looming juxtaposition. In V, this is often satiated in the lyrical messages. “Hold on tight, cause it’s violent in the garden after dark,” Nielson warns in the opening track.
Elsewhere, the ominous nature is even more obvious. In ‘I Killed Captain Cook’, one of my favourites among the slower-tempo tracks, Nielson ruminates over a murder he’s committed. Meanwhile, the stripped-back acoustic guitar deconstructs the studio walls transporting the listener back to the 18th century, perhaps on a pirate vessel or a tropical beach with a storm brewing on the horizon.
I was worried the album might overstay its welcome after ‘The Garden’, but thankfully, the song was the longest effort on the album. While the opener is enjoyable, its middle section and refrain are too drawn out. However, a tempestuous guitar solo towards the end almost makes up for this.
The funky, tropical guitar lines are always welcome, but an entire double album of it would become monotonous. Thankfully, tracks like ‘Guilty Pleasures’, with its attractively irregular beat, the synth-driven ‘In The Rear Window’, the ambient, trickling ‘Keaukaha’, and, of course, the acoustic beauty of ‘I Killed Captain Cook’, bring respite and structure to the album.
This fifth Unknown Mortal Orchestra album is a triumph and certainly begs for a relisten. With five years since the last album, a double LP release was more than justified, but such projects require a lot of thought. Double albums have a tendency to alienate the listener with relentlessness, or – as The Beatles displayed in 1968 – with a selection of tracks that could be split into one masterpiece and one throw-away. UMO fell into neither of these traps thanks to a spread of funky, transportive and thought-provoking tracks punctuated by well-placed eclecticism.
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