MARKET - Well I Asked You A Question - LP - Vinyl [NOV 1]

LP - Standard Edition Black Vinyl.  

The reliably inventive songwriting project Market is a vessel for producer Nate Mendelsohn’s obsessive questions and answers, recollections of conversation and interior monologues. Well I Asked You A Question, his second release for Western Vinyl, is a giant step inward, brimming with a humorous, neurotic candor only outmatched by a wide and colorful sonic palette. Calling the album “a personal vision of pop music,” Mendelsohn blends internet eclecticism, adventurous orchestration, and hyper-focused production throughout the album, building a whole from the fragments of his curiosity.

Since writing 2022’s The Consistent Brutal Bullshit Gong, Mendelsohn has become more entrenched in his Brooklyn, NY music community, producing the recent Frankie Cosmos and Dougie Poole albums, performing in Vagabon and Sam Evian, and recording with Yaeji and Lady Lamb. These experiences with adventurous artists worked their way into Mendelsohn’s songwriting, and in addition to his early years in the jazz and avant-garde worlds have yielded an album that’ll likely turn your head if you’re fond of records named Pet Sounds, Fantasma, Insignificance, Blonde, or XO. Like some of those mentioned, Well I Asked You A Question’s aforementioned sonic palette melds the physical and the synthetic: sampled orchestras duel with real ones (“Fantasy”), a robot’s spoken word duets with a choir of humans (“Around”), and blasts of noise “solo” over traditional rock instrumentation (“Rachel’s Getting Married”).

As he cultivates the most distinctive Market record to date, what feels most subversive this go-around is the lyrical perspective Mendelsohn has honed. A puzzle and language aficionado, he pours a surplus of energy into these wordy and empathetic songs. The lyrical topics have been filtered through Mendelsohn’s obsessive tendencies, and in some cases those tendencies are in fact the topic at hand. The consequences of his plain-spoken language may be small, and that’s the point. Take “Apple,” a recollection of his dad’s frustration at Mendelsohn’s twin sister arriving six-minutes late, spun out into a study of nature and nurture, and the magical meaning he assigns to being six-minutes her junior. He wonders aloud: “how could I not see by now? / the frightening percentile of gifts the apple gave / and sure the curses / the bruised and broken edges where the fruit is at its worst is / just part of how we’re made.” On “Water Spilling Test,” described as “a breakup song, zoomed way in,” Mendelsohn meditates on how destructively a glass of water could be spilled, what can be ruined in a moment’s time. “Sertraline” is a rushing fever dream about “self-mythologizing, art making, archiving, and understanding yourself through the stories you cling to, mutate, and sometimes reject.” As the song culminates and builds to an orchestral eddy, Mendelsohn balances everything with a coda that starts with a playful nod to Radiohead: “a pig in a cage on klonopin / baby are you listening? / I don’t have that peace of mind anymore / obviously I’m tougher than / even just a year ago / dicing up your ego / what a bore.”

Though many of the sounds on the record are augmented and fractured, Mendelsohn still worked with the Market band of Stephen Becker, Natasha Bergman, and Duncan Standish to build out the songs. He wanted “musical accidents with frayed edges left in—still a group of people, in a room, playing songs.” Beyond the core band, world-expanding contributions came from Katie von Schleicher, Mike Haldeman (Moses Sumney, Alto Palo), Justin Felton (L’Rain, Strugglin’), Rose Droll (Feist, Art Feynman) and Helen Newby with engineering by Adam Hirsch (Sam Amidon, Stephen Steinbrink).

With Well I Asked You a Question Mendelsohn tempers his ambitious and complex goals by aiming at the heart of human experience, using the local to express the universal. Lyrically, it’s an exploration of speaking, asking, responding and the muddled nature of talking to one’s self versus interacting with others. In his words, he’s alternately “escaping the noise of the world by going inward” and “escaping the noise of the brain by going outward.” Whether swaddled in sound or absorbing the errant thoughts it carries, we’re along for the ride. 

Tracklist: