ARTS
6

Thursday, August 1, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

“You can never publish my 
love,” Rogue Wave chants, in the 
song that the title of this series 
riffs on. Maybe that’s true, and 
we can never quite account for 
our love on paper or in print, but 
we sure can try. That’s what this 
series is devoted to: publishing 
our love. Us, the Arts section of 
The Michigan Daily, talking about 
artists, some of the people we love 
the most. Perhaps these are futile 
approximations of love for the 
poet who told us we deserve to be 
heard, the director who changed 
the way we see the world, the 
singer we see as an old friend. But 
who ever said futile can’t still be 
beautiful?
In 2013, an obscure, post-met-
al outfit released its sophomore 
record, the psychedelic, blaring-
ly tender Sunbather. The album’s 
artwork is simple and unforget-
table: a pleasant salmon gradient 
overlaid with white, stripped-to-
the-bone minimal lettering that 
spells out the title in three rows 
and three columns. That is to say, 
Sunbather’s aesthetic is far from 
what most would consider metal. 
And yet appearances are deceiv-
ing. 
If Sunbather proved anything, 
it’s that the primal shrieks, the 

thundering blast beats and the 
dissonant tremolo guitar chords 
of black metal can push into the 
fringes of mainstream when 
packaged in just the right way. 
Indeed, when Sunbather first 
broke through with a devout cult 
of listeners, it wasn’t treated like 
a metal album, but rather like 
something amorphous, the lost 
mutant child of post-punk and 
dream pop that had suddenly 
found its way back into the popu-
lar consciousness. 
Only years afterward did I 
discover the album myself. Like 
many other metalheads who 
propelled the album’s second 
wave of influence, I heard about 
Sunbather through the esoteric 
term “blackgaze.” “Blackgaze” 
was what people were calling 
this new stylized aggression, a 
hybrid of black metal and shoe-
gaze. I was immediately drawn 
into the sheer craft of the music, 
vividly aware that mention of the 
album’s style as its own subgenre 
were more than valid. It didn’t 
take me long to reckon with and 
accept the fact that a band called 
Deafheaven was profoundly and 
irreversibly 
shaping 
modern 
metal. 
I return time and time to 
Deafheaven because I discover 
something new on every listen, a 
quality that I find bitterly rare in 
experimental metal. Deafheav-
en’s ability to construct hazy, 

intensely 
evolving 
emotional 
journeys through a framework 
of traditional metal expanded 
my entire notion of what metal 
could be. That’s not to say that 
modern metal lacks emotion, 
or that it must even harness the 
very intimate to succeed. What 
Deafheaven offers that other 
current metal doesn’t is a range 
of feelings, some happy, some 
sad, most fleeting and impos-
sible to qualify. 
There’s something alchemical 
about the way that Deafheaven 
captures and builds upon the 
ephemeral. The band’s songwrit-
ing process is so singular in its 
vision, so personally embrac-
ing, that certain playthroughs 
of their albums embed them-
selves starkly in my memories. 
I can recall with remarkable 
ease everything I was doing and 
everything I was feeling dur-
ing one particular time I heard 
their third album New Bermuda. 
A specific afternoon after an 
algebra exam, a specific walk 
on a Florida beach. I, like many 
others, have similar experiences 
with albums important to me in 
my most formative and impres-
sionable years. But only a hand-
ful of artists can clearly capture 
the relationship between a mem-
ory and the moment.

Deafheaven’s staying power 

ANISH TAMHANEY 
Daily Arts Writer

MUSIC NOTEBOOK

Chance the Rapper’s debut studio 
album The Big Day is inescapably, 
embarrassingly bad. It seems that 
in the three years between Coloring 
Book and The Big Day, Chance has 
lost some fundamental aspect of his 
musical identity. 
The first three songs present the 
only strong sequence of ideas to be 
found across the bloated, 22-track 
project. “All Day Long” is a high-
energy opener, nothing to write 
home about but fun enough to lis-
ten to. “Do You Remember” is a 
highlight, thanks in large part to an 
elegant if slightly mawkish hook, 
courtesy of Ben Gibbard. “Eternal” 
is a solid, groovy effort featuring a 
creative and soul-
ful 
verse 
from 
Smino.
After that, it all 
goes off the rails. If 
you’ve ever listened 
to “Womp Womp” 
by 
Valee 
and 
thought to yourself, 
“Man, I really like this song, but I 
wish it had more lines about trying 
to go to sleep and also was a whole 
lot worse in every way,” then I high-
ly recommend you check out “Hot 
Shower.” If you’re like me, and this 
does not sound like something you 
would enjoy, the track would best be 
skipped. Dababy provides some last-
second life support with an excellent 
verse, but it’s not enough to redeem 
this subpar, plagiaristic misfire.
The next three songs (“We Go 
High,” “I Got You (Always and For-
ever)” and “Roo”) are good efforts 
and worth giving a listen if you’re 
attuned to Chance’s overarching 
vision. Everything after that ranges 
from forgettable to embarrass-
ing. There are so many confound-
ing decisions Chance made here. 
Why are there almost five minutes 
worth of skits? Why did the mad-
dening “Found a Good One (Single 
No More)” merit inclusion on an 
already-bloated tracklist? Why is he 
letting every single guest who isn’t 
named MadeinTYO or Francis Star-
lite outshine him? Why did he think 
“Hey there, lovely sister / Won’t you 
come home to your mister? / I’ve 

got plans to hug and kiss ya” (“Let’s 
Go On The Run”) was a good line? I 
don’t have the answers. 
“The Big Day,” the title track, the 
centerpiece of the album’s narrative, 
is an incoherent mess. The lyrics are 
laughable: “The only way to survive 
is to go crazy” sounds like some-
thing Heath Ledger’s Joker would 
say. The beat is slow and plodding, 
creating a sense of claustropho-
bic anxiety that I’m certain wasn’t 
intended to be conveyed on a happy 
song about his wedding day. Fran-
cis Starlite’s vocals are terrible. The 
jarring screaming halfway through 
the track, aside from sounding sus-
piciously similar to Frank Ocean’s 
outro on “Biking,” is a complete and 
utter failure that takes the listener 
out of whatever semblance of an 
emotional atmosphere that has been 
created up to that point. 
As a fan of most 
of Chance’s previ-
ous work, I find 
The Big Day to be 
bitterly disappoint-
ing. This is the type 
of album that you 
release after you’ve 
surrounded your-
self with yes men and spent your 
free time shooting Kit-Kat commer-
cials and riffing with the Wendy’s 
Twitter account. This is the type of 
album you make when you’re resting 
on your laurels. 
It seems as though Chance has 
lost the ability to make his life seem 
compelling. Where did his sense 
of humor go? His willingness to be 
weird and experimental seems to 
now be limited to trying on the styl-
ings of other artists, mere artistic 
mimesis. The vibrancy of 10 Day, 
Acid Rap and Coloring Book are 
nowhere to be found, and it’s hard to 
believe that the person responsible 
for those three projects was involved 
with The Big Day at all. 
Listening to The Big Day produc-
es in me the same uneasy feeling as 
watching a commercial, the sense 
that I am being somehow tricked. 
It is plastic soul, the worst effort 
Chance has put out to date, and (puts 
fingers to temples) I predict it will be 
nominated for several Grammys. 
I fear that this record is so tedious 
and self-absorbed as to be indicative 
of the end of Chance’s artistic rel-
evance. I hope he proves me wrong.

Chance’s album 
is just plastic soul

JONAH MENDELSON
Daily Arts Writer

ALBUM REVIEW

Read more at michigandaily.com

The Big Day

Chance the Rapper

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