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tUnE-yArDs Has Become Too Quirky for Her Own Good

She is now everything her critics always accused her of.

From the second the out-of-place organ hits in the first few seconds of Nikki Nack's opener “Find A New Way,” I knew something was wrong with the new tUnE-yArDs album. As I listened through, there were a few moments of pure brilliance, but more often, there were words and arrangements that made me cringe. As much as I hate to admit it, it's inescapable: tUnE-yArds has become what her critics always accused her of. She's become too quirky for her own good.

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Critics like Chuck Klosterman (i.e. white, 30-something, “serious” straight dudes), who wrote a condescending, sexist essay about her in 2012, have always been assholes about tUnE-yArDs and her quirky streak. Despite their disapproval and anger over her alternating capitalization, Merril Garbus, who is tUnE-yArDs, has always been smart enough to understand the potential turn offs of her art, and to not care. Her music is about disarming those who are afraid of unmasked emotion and vulnerability. Her music, and its subjects, is also distinctly feminine, and many of the people who have written negatively about her lack of seriousness or overuse of emotion have denigrated her in a gendered fashion. But she has succeeded despite them, garnering mostly rave reviews and wowing increasingly larger audiences around the world. Garbus, with her willingness to not take herself too seriously while displaying her serious talent both live and recorded, was the perfect foil for the indie rock establishment.

For these reasons, I've always stood up for tUnE-yArds in the face of people who tried to make her into a joke. That is, until now.

In a recent interview with Pitchfork, Garbus said that for her new album, she "really needed to unlearn everything I had done so far.” This seems like a tragic misstep for someone who'd been making such great work up until this point. As much as I hate to admit it, her new album emphasizes the very things I've always denied her critics. Unlike in the past, where her knack for creative use of looping and fearlessly strange vocals worked perfectly, the songs here meander, with too many ideas stuffed into too little space. Then there's the unlistenable interlude wherein she employs her puppeteering past to voice a vignette about the merits of tater tots. Don't get me wrong, I think it's awesome that she used to do puppet shows. But we didn't buy a ticket to that part of her life when we bought this record, and as soon as I heard the misplaced piece I prayed desperately that I could unhear it. The lyrics throughout are also painfully on the nose, starting on the first track when she sings in the second stanza “He seemed like a really nice guy” or on the questionable “Hey Life” where she rues waking up “feeling albatrosy.” Nikki Nack exists in the “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” school of experimentation, and at this point in her career, Garbus' authorial voice is strong enough that this method falls flat. It's not the powerful, focused work that we've come to expect of her. “On the one hand there's what sounds good, on the other there's what's true,” Garbus sings on “Look Around.” Unfortunately, I have to agree. As much as I wanted to love this album, I can't ignore the many parts of it that obviously fail to do what they're supposed to.

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The ukelele. Quirk, defined.

The current critical definition of “quirkiness” is that of something cloying, twee, and infantilizing: stuff like Zooey Deschanel's persona or miniature crocheted food on Etsy (this amazing SNL sketch sums it up nicely). Clearly, it hasn't always been this way. There's no limit to what you could potentially describe as quirky—Barack Obama's foreign policy, David Lynch's hair, the G train. Unfortunately, Nikki Nack falls squarely into the “quirky” zone that Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein have made a living parodying. The album feels a little too much like an arts and crafts party for adults. I'm not one to hate on that kind of thing, but the topics she's addressing here are too important to be diminished by silliness. On “Real Thing,” denunciations like “I come from the land of slaves / Let's go Redskins! / Let's go Braves!” and poignant lyrics about her struggle with eating disorders are obscured by a radical word salad. In the past, the degree of quirk in her music worked to her benefit. tUnE-yArDs' last album w h o k i l l, her best work yet, mixed inventive beats and vocal styles with serious topics. The work it took to decipher the true meaning of the songs added to their potency. For example, “Doorstep,” a gorgeous, doo-wop influenced number, was a perfectly lovely listen until you realized it was a story about a woman's boyfriend getting murdered by the police. But on Nikki Nack there's just too much going on to focus on what matters, like an activist march where everyone's campaigning for a different cause.

In the same interview, Garbus told Pitchfork she'd been studying pop structure while writing her album, ripping up her old writing process and starting anew in an attempt make her songs more memorable. The question is why—songs like “Gangsta” or “Hatari” off her last two records were already catchy as hell and impossible to get out of your head. Despite her efforts, few of Nikki Nack's songs cohere into a whole, instead existing as a mishmash of half-formed ideas. One of the beautiful things about tUnE-yArDs' music is its directness, and that's been lost here. Garbus has fallen into a trap that few artists ever fully avoid: trying too hard. This isn't true for every song: the Celtic-influenced “Rocking Chair” hits much harder than the songs that try to accomplish the impossible by incorporating a thousand disparate ideas. Her unique vocal strengths are on full display here and real emotion pervades—there are also about five words in the entire song.

I'm not worried that she'll never get it back. Despite the uncomfortable moments on this record, there's plenty that's enjoyable, like the simple charms of clap-and-stomp “Water Fountain,” or the smooth, Solange-y R&B of “Wait for a Minute.” Garbus is still an incredibly talented, charismatic artist bursting with ideas, and I would hate to see her written off as a novelty. We can only hope that in the future she'll come to fully believe in that herself.

Sophie Weiner is scanning Etsy for things with birds on them. Follow her on Twitter - @sophcw