Miller skips party for movie night

There hasn’t been a party in the last year that didn’t have “Donald Trump” bumping through the speakers, but it makes sense that Mac Miller can no longer recite the song’s lyrics without a dead-eyed emptiness. Being pigeonholed so early as a college rapper, it’s fair that he wants to create things more melodic, more otherworldly.

For an album meant to reflect his unfiltered artistic voice, there sure is a lot of vocal tweaking to sound like chipmunks or Tyler the Creator’s therapist. Ultimately his cadences on the sophomore album are the same, but the music underneath is a stark contrast from earlier work. The beats are slower, spacier. It’s closer to “Macadelic” than his beloved party anthems. He’s making something lasting on this record and it has an ethereal, underwater quality. Like the soundtrack to a turtle’s life (the visual counterpart to the album’s web stream).

The lyrics themselves don’t really add much, save for a few allusions to his negative public image and the pursuit of dreams. They have the nonsensical wordiness of Earl Sweatshirt, but invoke more of a particular feeling than an actual message. The pretty poetry of choruses sung on tracks such as “I Am Who I Am” and “Objects In the Mirror” are more intensely meaningful than Mac’s stoic delivery of bland raps. There is one short-lived declaration of “woo!” but none of the goofy inflections he has come to be known for. Some of the lyrics retain his playful nature (“suck my dick before I slap you with it”), but otherwise the “nature” is of a very literal sort, the album having been recorded during silent viewings of bird documentaries. There are Tarzan-like beats and chirpy synths, so some of the riffs sound like you’re crawling through the thunderous “jungle” gym at Chuck E. Cheese’s. In a good way.

Mac Miller creating a sit-down concert set is not necessarily a bad thing, but having witnessed the drunk douchebags who come to his shows, I’m interested to see how his fanbase evolves. The audience member in the green man suit I witnessed last year will be hopelessly out of place in the future, unless he’s part of an interpretive dance. “Watching Movies With the Sound Off” is a much more sophisticated work than the fun opening chants of “1, 2, 3, 4...” on older songs.

This album is a journey. It’s for plane rides and drug trips and experiences made to step outside of yourself. That’s where it comes together as one sonic adventure. There’s nothing conceptually cohesive about the tracks otherwise. There’s depth, but it’s murky. Mac just asks fans to trust him. On “Aquarium” he questions whether listeners will “follow (him) wherever (his) mind goes.” If he can bring the intricate artistry of the music to his lyrics, he can lead me anywhere.