The critical establishment’s dogmatic popism eliminates any consideration of the philosophy surrounding the creative and commercial genesis of music and elevates the aesthetic, so whatever sounds best must be best, and now somehow independent music has wound up in a place where Beyoncé is on the same purely aesthetic playing field that Sharon Van Etten is, because it makes you powerfully, stinkingly uncool to point out that Beyoncé is a meticulously calculated, choreographed, and focus group-approved product of the same system that Sharon Van Etten’s forebears in independent music rose up as a direct response to.
—David Shapiro, Pazz & Jop Comments 2011
Replace Beyoncé with Katy Perry and Sharon Van Etten with Diamond Rings, and you have a pretty good starting point from which to launch a defense of the latter’s new album, Free Dimensional. It’s still unclear if Diamond Rings brainchild John O’Regan would ever allow dreams of his persona being co-opted as a means of mainstream success, but despite the slick surfaces of these new productions, an ecstatic impoverishment prevails. O’Regan sounds content, as he did on his debut, to be able to realize his vision of a glittering and endlessly self-affirming pop world entirely with his own talents and imagination. If that kind of world isn’t to your liking, you can at least give him credit by rewriting the above quote, “so whatever sounds worst must be worst,” and concluding, well, no, O’Regan’s bad sounds are inherently better, because they’re his.
And that’s all I really wanted to say about Free Dimensional. An album like this one needs not thorough analysis, but, in the wake of a few negative reviews, merely someone to clear the way for skeptics to start enjoying it. Still, I must go on, if only to clarify that my mention of Katy Perry above was far from arbitrary. O’Regan opened for some of Robyn’s shows last year, and she in turn opened for Perry, so there’s a chain of relationships that might seem to point to O’Regan as intended, by increments, for the latter’s realm, perhaps not inaccurately. But I prefer to hear Free Dimensional as a fair and intelligent appropriation of mainstream pop’s reliable gestures and phrases, by a man who has legitimate use for them. Titles like “I’m Just Me” and “(I Know) What I’m Made Of” seem to spring from a “Part of Me” robot world, in which identity is composed merely of its own constant assertion: I am therefore I am. But where that kind of declaration usually points to a void at the center of a corporate creation, to be filled by you the listener, O’Regan’s outwardly vapid claims work to his advantage, because there are elements of himself in these songs deeper than his voice. And when he sings lines like “we could be a real disaster” and “I wanna lose control” on “Runaway Love,” he’s voicing the sentiments people crave when they listen to Pink or Ke$ha. So how refreshing to hear them spoken by a person who still inhabits the matrix of real life decision and consequence. Pop stars are under enormous amounts of pressure, too, but that’s not the drama they prefer to transmit to us. Maybe all we want is the simulation, anyway.
But not all of O’Regan’s words are human twists on radio language. “Everything speaks to me now,” he sings on the opening track, and the primordial weight of his synth environment makes it sound like he’s singing about the phase of life that immediately follows Hüsker Dü’s “Something I Learned Today.” The facts assembled, all is new but categorizable. And yet, throughout the rest of the album, he remains the essential bedroom performer he was on Special Affections, more brazen now in his private space but still rooted there, not in the speaking world. When I saw O’Regan perform in 2011, I wondered what his future held, a question that Free Dimensional has delayed, not answered. Where Perfume Genius limited his era of “learning” to one album, O’Regan has codified and expanded his. And if he remains a private dancer for the rest of his career, I wouldn’t mind, but I await the day when he emerges from the bedroom, completes his learning on the stage, and then captures its energy on a live recording, or better yet, a studio album that knows no retreat.
But, in other ways, Free Dimensional is more than just an amplification of the debut. Among the notable additions to O’Regan’s repertoire is a new style of rapping, which joins hypnotic baritone and would-be falsetto (closer to Gary Numan) as a versatile vocal setting. The so-called “clumsy rap verses,” which accumulate in the album’s second half, are in fact perfectly executed, clumsy only if you assume O’Regan is aiming for some imagined other level of MC skill. But the medium and even the content of his rhymes are secondary to his presence as a performer (though I must note the weird, easy-to-miss bell hooks reference on “What I’m Made Of”). I’d love to see how he handles these moments live, but even if we found out he’s only rapping into a mirror, on record he sounds gleefully committed. Earlier on the album, he speak-sings the verses of “All The Time” as a preview of his rapping: “We can be whatever we believe when we’re together and we both know that we’re never going to care what they say. We don’t need a label or an antiquated fable to define what we’re unable to describe anyway.” He says this in the context of a love song, but he might also be referring to his intuitive approach to music, where no category or fable of authenticity dare trouble the water of pure self-expression, or to his enactment of an individual vision of the world, born of limited information and sincere imagination. But next time, maybe he should care what they say, and then transcend it. He concludes in a later verse, “We can channel our intention deep into a new dimension free of fear and apprehension and politics.”
