As everyone who has ever written about Canadian indie pop dude Rich Aucoin is just dying to let you know, the Nova Scotia native favors high-concept production approaches for his albums. You could also say that he likes gimmicks. In the interest of fairness, I will refrain from referring to them as such though.
What do I mean? well, his first EP was meant to be synched with How the Grinch Stole Christmas. His first album featured 500 guest musicians, many of whom, like Jay Ferguson of Sloan, dumped a considerable amount of cred into his social currency account. Further, his most recent album, United States, was released last year following a cross-country bicycle ride from LA to NYC where he supposedly wrote the thing.
I need to get all this stuff out of the way because it’s basically all anyone who writes about Rich seems to want to talk about. Now that the wind-up is done, though, we can unleash the pitch: Rich Aucoin’s United States is good, and here is why.
I wanted to write about this album last year when it dropped, but it somehow slipped through the cracks in my schedule. Now that we’re celebrating the United States (the country)’s birthday again, it seems like a good opportunity to return United States (the album). Here we see Rich dredging up the bright and effervescent dance-pop of the ’80s and early ’90s to serve as a soundtrack to make points about the struggles of modern living as a manifestation of a larger system of inequality.
Diminishing expectations (“Kayfabe”), racially motivated violence (“How It Breaks”), and the crisis manufactured by U.S. immigration policy on its southern border with Mexico (“Walls”) are all addressed in turn- bruising commentary delivered with a pulse of a drum machine in its veins and a zip of synth lightning coursing through its bones.
There are a lot of good points made on this album about living through the collapse of an empire, but the circumstances that Rich interrogates on this release are shared by the vast majority of Canadians as well. They may not have to worry about going bankrupt because someone in their family needs chemo, but they are struggling with a lot of similar economic pressures as their neighbors to the South.
The title of the opening “Kayfabe” track tells you a lot about what Rich is attempting to accomplish here- to the bubble of fiction that enshrines the whole enterprise of empire. It might not be, as everyone’s favorite Slovenian might say, an attempt revel the underlying ideology justification of capital (snorts and wipes nose on palm), but it’s getting there. Invariably, what it lacks in insights, it makes up for in pure indigence in the face of the conditions most people are forced to suss out a living under.
The tone struck on United States reminds me a lot of the recent Bo Burnham special Inside, and its not surprising to me that they were both created and released during a global pandemic (and it’s not just because there is singing in both, but that does help). During his feature-length, comedy special, Bo grapples with the fact that his reality has been fundamentally altered by COVID.
In coming to terms with his life in quarantine, he comes to the slow realization that this dramatic shift in circumstances in the world outside hasn’t actually changed him or his life all that much. Instead, it’s only made the things he previously felt and experience that much more intense, concentrated, and harder to avoid.
If there is a political message to be drawn from the special, it’s that whatever Bo and the rest of us were previously doing to keep the wheels of society turning, it’s not presently working to our benefit, and probably never had. Rich’s the United States arrives at much the same conclusion, only through the experience of witnessing the devastation of the pandemic and long accumulating immiseration first hand, rather than simply contemplating it in isolation like Bo.
When I was a kid I would notice revolutionary messages in dance and pop songs all the time. But because everyone else seemed to ignore these aspects of the songs that played on the radio (would usually tell me to shut up when I tried to explain to them how I heard the songs) I eventually learned to do the same- ignore the message, stick to the beat. But I never forgot that feeling of receiving a coded message in a bottle from artists who might not know that I exist, but certainly know how I felt.
I definitely got that sense from United States while bobbing my head to the soul-funk slap of “Blue Highway,” the whimsical whirl and industrious patterns of “This Is It,” and disco string and sugar beat stitch-up “Civil.”
The 4th is an occasion to celebrate with friends and family, enjoying their company, and having a good time, but there isn’t any rule that says that you can’t think about how a better world could be made while you celebrate. In fact, I can’t think of a better time to indulge such thoughts than on the birthday of a nation that lauds itself as the product of a justified revolution.
You can buy and stream United States via Bandcamp below:
You can get a copy of United States on vinyl from Haven Sounds here.
