Mutable Set
Blake Mills
2020 – Pop / Experimental
New Deal
With the help of playful dreams and discreet social criticism, Blake Mills’ new album is built on an incredible writing together with a deep and very sentimental sound
Shortly after releasing her first album, Break Mirrors, Blake Mills was on a wave of concerts and radio covers for years. The monotonous that invaded his time interval made him stop, think and come to a drastic conclusion: from now on he would start producing music, discover new styles and sound cultures and break the glue that kept him attached to his guitar. He was anxious and hungry for new sounds and arrangements that made him want to break away from the pop and rock-country origins of his band Simon Dawes, in which he developed a love for the guitar that could have become a great guitarist. However, that was not enough, or at least, it would not satisfy Mills’ future desires.
As a skilled and voracious producer, he worked with Fiona Apple, Perfume Genius and Laura Marling. All this variety made him discover himself in his own sound that has been moving towards something more and more and more original. As said, his first album, Break Mirrors, in which there was a remarkable predominance of a Rock-Country composed of guitars, basses and guitars, still had chains in his past, however, after his exchange as a producer, his second album, Heigh Ho, arrived with the same guitars, however, now Mills had a new ambition: the distorted, elegant and grand synths invaded the songs in a scary way. In 2018, with Look, an almost instrumental ep, he put the lyrics aside and focused his efforts on the sound: he effectively mixed the modern synthetic with the analogical and ancient harmonic. Now in 2020, his new album, Mutable Set, is an improvement on this sound that was developed years ago alongside fantastic writing, creating an album that is full of dreams, ambitions and exalted feelings.
Taking his latest project as the starting point for Mutable Set, Blake begins as a mysterious, sinister and inviting haze built by a synthetic church organ. It takes almost two minutes for the singer’s voice to appear in “Never Forever”, however, even with this long prologue, the music is intense, sentimental and poetic. Then, next to a nice guitar, he sings about the path the world has taken (“We’re waiting in line / For thirty minutes / For a cup of coffee”; “And the tv program / Takes a decade to understand” ) and how he feels a desire to escape this monotone and tedious world. Later on the album, “Mirror Box”, a totally instrumental track, has a guitar that calms and invites, however, the background synthesizers, which seem to be a mixture of electronic birds with saxophones, are intriguing and repulsive. Even so, the track creates a desire and dependence for the sound that is an unbelievable homogeneous mixture, making the listener want more, even after almost five minutes of this sound.
However, the most powerful and unbeatable point of the entire album are Mills’ lyrics that reach lucid and fanciful dreams in some tracks, creating a new and insatiable fable, making the listener always want more of these simple stories that are built in the middle of the album. “May Later”, which features a fine and smooth guitar alongside atmospheric synthesizers that create a sense of suspense and fear, but also familiarity, is the best example of Mills’ dreams. Rather than dreaming of frantic adventure scenes, his dreams are alternative and experimental just like his sound: after being woken by a siren saying “go back to your bed”, he visits a sleepy mountain and asks “Is now a good time?”. Despite having a simple lyric built by simple lines like a children’s fable, the track sounds poetic and very beautiful.
Even though Blake’s dream world is golden, reality still haunts him. “Money is the One True God” is one of the best tracks on the album, not due to the work of sound layers that mix Mills’ skeptical vocals with the mysterious whispers and instruments that seem to have come out of a modern jazz record, but because of the relation that Mills does between money and religion. In this range, he criticizes the fact that money has become the main global entity, the only one that has equal power over everyone. However, you are distracted by the verses of the new economic bible (“Forgive me, Lord, I’m broken / Come to my pocket / I bear my soul to the one true god”) that you barely notice that, over the course of six minutes, the track starts from an initial stage of calm and rhythm to a dense and synthetic monster at the end, thus creating one of the best progressions on the entire album.
In general, something that dominates throughout the album is Blake’s lyric ability to create images and situations, lucid or not, in a unique way. In “Eat My Dust” he paints scenes that are confusing but are deeper than their combination: “Life eats life / Dog eats dog / Who are we / To say it’s wrong?”. Although in “Summer All Over” there is a hope (“Look, it’s not gonna rain again / Winter, winter is over / It’s summer all over the world”), he turns his concerns back to his anxiety and fear for an end alongside of a sentimental and deep piano (“And everyone will soon be here / Looking for laughter / Looking for kindness”). The sadness of “Farsickness” is related to the memory, where he misses his beloved and better times.
Although there are tracks too complex to understand all their mystical meaning, they still manage to pass their feelings through their isolated words or deep instruments. “Window Facing a Window” paints brilliant palaces and dead gardens as he asks the listener in an almost whispering voice: “Are you upset? / Are you done yet / Falling out of love?”. Although “Vanishing Twin” seems confused in his lyrics painting a kind of lunar farewell, the choruses where Blake talks about a twin are beautiful, not only for the instruments that create this mysterious and dark atmosphere, but also for Blake’s vocals that sound captivating and terrifying at the same time. The ballad “My Dear One” is ambitious, it sounds empty but full at the same time while Millis tirelessly asks: “My dear one, shelter my heart”.
At the end of the album, “Off Grid” is not only the finishing card for the somber (but friendly) Mutable Set, but also a sign that will continue Blake’s feelings. At the end of the song he sings: “Opening the door” and lets the rest run through the instruments, which are weakening each time: the pianos stop sounding so deep, the synthesizers are no longer as dense and the saxophones lose their majesty. Although the track is short, small and unambitious, it is deeper than it looks, making us feel something curious: fear, courage, sadness and relief. Certainly, something almost inexplicable, as well as the entire Mutable Set.
LISTEN ON: Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal
The Soundx 