it's a blues record, but then what is the point of the experimentation? what does it communicate to you?
a big part of what made the album first "click" for me was noticing how at various moments, often within the same song, the level of dissonance and rhythmic clutter perceptibly shifts, rising or falling. hence the impression of forms shattering and rebuilding. and for me that strengthened the sense that the musical "off-ness" was expressive, not a mere novelty.
to make a very sweeping generalization, i think in western music greater discordance tends to be associated with a) both madness and b) a kind of rugged, freewheeling spirit. and both of those associations seem very relevant here. there's a rym review or something that describes this album as "if howlin wolf got stuck in a hall of mirrors for a hundred years" —which perfectly conveys how the blues is distorted into "mad" forms on the album. but it doesn't quite capture the positive flip side: the
fun of it all
, how the album's bursting with melodies and imagery and energy. at different points, one side or the other is foregrounded, but both are essential and ever-present in the album's overall sound.
so to me tmr feels like some rollicking 40s serial adventure story—if the protagonist (a hobo, probably ancient) wasn't just crazy within genre constraints but crazy in a way that made him
truly free. getting in the mind of such a character and following his adventures would, you'd imagine, be both deeply unsettling and (as patrick bateman might put it) a real laugh riot.
"my spirit's made up of the ocean, and the sky, and the sun, and the moon, and all i can see"
tl;dr what linebaugh said