Bobby Oroza: Who mourns the future?
Only a fool, and occassionally that's me. But not when it comes to Bobby Oroza's ace new album
Bobby Oroza Get On The Otherside (Big Crown)
The sound - to speak with deliberate reductivism- is GORGEOUS. First second you know. Immaculately unimmaculate, perfectly frayed, perfectly grainy, absolutely disinterested in anything apart from delight.
Part of me can’t believe that’s enough for me now. That I might be approaching in my late 40s an apolitical almost purely sonic pleasure in music but part of me wonders if it was ever thus. What Bobby Oroza - who is a soul singer from Helsinki — does here is create a peach-perfect suite of late 60s/early 70s-flecked soul, touching on the likes of solo artists like Donny Hathaway, Al Green and Curtis Mayfield and groups like the Temps, Rotary Connection and the Impressions. 20 years ago if I’d have heard this I may well have asked what was the point, and directed you towards contemporary r’n’b/hip hop that touched upon a similar spirit but tried to do so with a new sound. In 2022 I deeply deeply question the viability of that idea - a ‘new sound’. I don’t applaud this wonderful record FOR its retroism. But judging music by whether it’s ‘dated’ or not has, I think, finally, as post-modernity always promised, become of supreme irrelevance. Crack into the opener ‘I Got Love’ and I defy you to resist. I defy you to have a problem cos of its ‘datedness’. There are no dates in music anymore. Release dates are only numbers useful to promotion and the pusillanimous timing of that promotion. Music, and all music history is now just an endless malleable time-space moebus that you can journey around with total freedom thanks to that pocket-rocket-to-all-points-in-space-and-time that is your phone. And if I WANT to listen to this record as if it’s a long-lost 60s classic I will. I think we’re in a golden age for music but it’s curious that to reach this golden age, or rather to fully immerse ourselves in and understand this golden age, we have to nigh-on abandon the idea of history. Anything else would mean something entirely unacceptable - the idea that MY response is better than HIS/HER response because I might know the sources of something. Irrelevant. I hear a million records when ‘I Got Love’ washes over me but oddly right now, that actually makes my response inferior to someone who’s never heard anything like it. I’m trying to figure out why something so sonically dated can be so appealing to someone who grew up a ferocious futurist. And I’m wondering whether I’ve given something up that I should want back, or whether I’ve just shed my illusions finally about time and listening. I’ve been thinking about this alot and it’s all been fired by my irresitible adoration of this new Bobby Oroza album.
(Being, or at least pretending, to be a ‘musician’ HAS changed my thoughts about pop, and how I approach criticising it. I have shifted my sensibilities massively over the past 20 odd years of being in a band - where music as a teen/20-something was pure pleasure to me, or at least something I wanted to keep pristine from its protagonists, reduced entirely to how sound and the visuals of pop effected me, I now have to admit that the PEOPLE and the MOTIVATIONS are massively massively important. Not talking about morality - my record collection like yours is populated by several utterly unforgivably wretched people - I’m more talking about how perhaps the only important question to ask a musician is WHY they do what they do. And I’m not talking about the drive towards endless contextualisation that seems to push all the crazy rhapsody out of pop crit. You’re still failing as a critic if you don’t talk about how music makes you feel. But I’ve loosened up. Time was where a push towards the future was all-important to me, especially in those Britpop times where the past was being re-rotated, mis-represented and used to shore up conservative ideas about ‘proper’ music. Of course I dug those artists who were unashamedly dated too IF they gave extreme pleasure - Big Chief, Monster Magnet, and pretty much every grunge/stoner-rock band I ever liked were all deliberately past-facing and I loved them for it - but overwhelmingly I wanted and yearned to glimpse a putative future - for music, and for the world - in the music I loved. And I found it in hip hop, jungle, garage, noise and pop. Why do I now find it also in unashamedly retro-pop like Bobby Oroza?)
On the sublime track that follows - ‘Loving Body’ - Oroza, in setting up these two slices of dew-fresh perfection - lets us know his soundworld isn’t going to change, that this is an album that is going to work precisely because it stays gorgeously limited in palette, it’s gonna stay where the beats are gonna roll and thunk, where the vocals are damn near gaseous, where the hooks are understated but unmistakeable, where the instrumentation is all about minimalism, lack of indulgence and service to the groove. Oroza is indupitably whiteboy blue-eyed soul but this aint no Danny Wilson it’s more like Lambchop, it’s got HEAT to its fragility, a cool hard-boiledness that’s unmistakably Nordic. Check the rippling lissomness of ‘The Otherside’, how guitars are allowed to pick yet radiate out, how the drumfills are never ever ever showy but always just the right side of providing propulsion and incline into sections of refraction and decay. It’s all incredibly controlled but ego-less. What I delight in isn’t just the pleasure, it’s that queasy intellectual high-wire it gets you walking: what am I hearing here? A reimagined past with all the attendant political/contextual insensitivity that implies? Or - as I suspect is more the case - a document that could actually never have existed any time but now, where the future has firmly and irretrievably been LOST?
(Futurism was, counter-intuitively, an easy metric to stick to as a listener. Somewhere along the line I realised it intersected with personality and motivation. If I heard any ‘record-collection rock’ that didn’t add something crucially new, i.e was imprinted with the unique nature of the person collating the influences together, I wasn’t interested. And if that person seemed like a half-wit/mediocre talent (Gillespie, the Gallaghers) I was actively hostile, and innately suspicious of those kinds of acts of larceny and cowardice that enabled you to become a ‘legend’ in those regressive, parochial, cowed 90s. Where the motivation is to make people think of influences and thus confer the cannonical approval of legitimacy and lineage to the music I resist that impulse intensely, often because that kind of record-collection-rock just reminds you of how withered these simulacras are in contrast to their sources. And how much cultural complexity can be erased by certain reimaginings of the past)
Oroza is NOT doing that. Or at least he has dignity and style enough to never seem ‘clever’ or ‘artful’, only honest and adrift. Oroza is NOT trying to be any of his influences. He’s not even trying to make you think of those influences or ‘admire’ his taste, and irony is nothing to do with this record. I think his pain is important. He’s lovelorn. You can hear it. And you believe it. Sink into the sublime ‘Soon Everyone Will Know’ and you can hear him seeking an end to his pain in these grooves, in these gorgeous harmonies and textures. Sonically, in its 60s/70s focus, this record is a sublime escape act but it’s an escape that’s expressive of things he can’t escape from. Crucially Oroza seems to be an artist unconvinced of time, unconvinced that the past and future aren’t just different facets of this very moment right now. And that’s why this album isn’t just gorgeous to listen to, it’s stirring because it’s HONOURABLE, there’s nothing underhand or hoodwinky about it. In 2022, it feels less like a desire to vanish, more like a supremely honest response to these times wherein our cubicles of taste and our phones stop all clocks, open all doors. Why can’t Bobby be whoever the hell he wants to be? Crucially, why can’t Bobby dream himself in sound? He does, and it’s not a shallow dream, it’s a deep dive, it’s a world he’s created here. A world more honest to the time-travelling capabilities of taste and creativity in 2022, a world that knows there is no longer any meaning to the word ‘contemporary’ when it comes to music and listening. There is only the present (and thus the past and the future) we CHOOSE to confect.
(In 2022 I cannot think of a more foolhardy (re)quest than looking for the ‘future’. The future came and went mate. Belongs to billionairres now. And the reason I stopped looking for it as a listener is two fold - on the one hand I suspect we are getting perilously close to a time when all the factorialed-possibilities of a soundwave have been done by someone, somewhere. It’s immensely rare that I hear anything ‘new’ anymore in that strict sonic sense. What IS new, and thrilling at the moment is NEW PEOPLE making music, specifically people who live between worlds, migrants both second and third generation who are fusing new music out of their power of double-think, their ability in sound to reverse the culturally imperialist history of pop thus far and configure new shapes, new structures and if not ‘sounds’ then at least new reimaginings of the past, alternative histories, and new dreams of a future. Thinking of artists as diverse and diffuse as Rosalia, Tanya Tagaq, The Mahgreban, St Abdullah, Tegh & Adel Poursamadi - what I hear in their astonishing music FEELS new, or at least feels like the uncovering of voices and visions previously entirely marginalised. I’d include Oroza in this, a Finnish soul boy who in any other era couldn’t even dream of bringing out music like this without being laughing-stocked into obscure silence. This is something the endless slow-death of the trad music biz - or at least the possibility of its dwindling importance to those of us who are interested in music rather than just commerce - totally liberates, and I applaud it immensely because we’ve reached a point in 2022 where it’s not even desirable to seek ‘new’ sounds as such. The world old feckers like me were bought up in - a world of linear ‘progress’ along chronological lines - has gone now, gone entirely, and the sooner we accept this the happier we will be as pop fans and listeners.)
And yet and yet and yet confection without conviction is ultimately unsatisfying. I USE the spectacular and impressive but entirely unmoving Khruangbin for precisely that purpose, I enjoy the soulless fantasy (and undeniable danceability) of their creations. That’s not really what’s going on here, and this is why Oroza ain’t just gonna light up my mixtapes to annoint myself with taste and proof of ‘learning’ - ‘Blinding Light’ is dazzling psyche-soul, is slivered with wah-wah’d licks and a strung out sense of lapsed faith and you realise that actually, Oroza himself is being dislocated inside by his emotional, and ultimately musical, obsessions. Weird kid. What’s he doing making this kinda music all by himself, in Finland? It’s twisting him outta shape. It’s making him wonder what, if anything, is real anymore. So he’s doing what we’re all doing now. Finding our roots where we wanna find our roots. At the lockdown time in which Oroza made this music the normal impetuses and motivations behind making music had entirely absconded - no record to make, no tour to get ready for, no promotional push. And you can hear that in the sounds of tracks like ‘Sweet Agony’ and ‘Make Me Believe’. We are used to artists pushing their music at us as if under duress, as if each syllable comes with its own pressure and trajectory conferred by the artist’s desires. These songs don’t feel like that. They feel like they emanate from a deep well of despair but they feel like Oroza doesn’t care if we hear them or not. I uncynically call this music sincere. And I have to have that TOGETHER with the sweetness of the sounds. I have to BELIEVE in these fantasies not just ADMIRE them (and that’s why for me Oroza is so far above/ahead anyone else making this kind of music right now apart from Durande Jones and Mourning [A] Blkstar). I cannot delight merely in the fact this music can be made in 2022. I still, residually, cling on to a vintage notion that music has to have a sense in which it NEEDS to be made, even if that music is ultra-commercial. And Oroza’s wilting despair, the way his lines and voice almost flicker themselves out of existence with feyness and forlornness makes ‘Otherside’ way way more than just an agglomeration of perfect influences. He wanted to tap into soul music’s power for his own purposes sure but those purposes are entirely emotional, nothing to do with proving his taste or cool. THAT’s why this confection ain’t just sweet, it’s searing and intimate and (un)real about Oroza’s reality to the point where you forget the future completely while you’re listening. You are just focussed purely on Oroza’s worryingly precarious present.
(and perhaps that ‘future’ was never there? Choosing an entirely different genre where do I find rock and roll now? Otoboke Beaver sure, but why do Gene Vincent & The Blue Caps ‘Catman’, The Ventures ‘Cruel Sea’ or Elvis’ 'Blue Moon [Take 9]’ touch me now with a sense of untrammelled freedom and intensity that refuses to be dimmed by time or context or history? That trick of music - of being both timely and timeless, of the moment and for the ages, looking forward but being a human MOMENT of feeling that could have existed at any time for the past two million years of our species’ lifespan - well it plays tricks with the mind doesn’t it. And as history spools back’n’forth on itself so something like Hildegaard De Bingen can still, grimly, posit times ahead)
Oroza is an amazing guitar player, ballsy enough to leave in mistakes, thoughtful enough to never intrude on a song’s unfolding with anything approaching indulgence. He does solos. Check his pellucid, liquid playing on ‘Passing Thing’ and see how many ideas he conjures, how much delicacy and restraint he uses. We get here to the nub of ‘originality’ and motivation: one could say that the time Oroza takes over these songs is in itself a vintage thing, that the whole idea of stepping off for a solo is in itself an attempt to conjure a different era. That’s emphatically NOT what comes across though on ‘Make Me Believe’ - what Oroza’s is lyrically fantasising about is connection, ANY sense of connection with himself, with others, with his music, with the listener, and he has this implicit realisation that the only way he’s going to find those things is to lose his ego, loosen his ideas about love away from fixation on object and towards a universal empathy. That’s an old soul idea but Oroza knows he ain’t coming from anything approaching gospel or faith or even community, so he keeps himself totally unpushy throughout the record - like Helado Negro his voice almost expires in its own softness and refusal to penetrate. The yearning is clear - to FEEL something in the encroaching numbness of right now. Without that yearning (best crystallised in the closing line of the record “I’m going to learn how to smile again. Be myself. Just myself”) this album would be nothing but smarts and skills. With that yearning it becomes something altogether unexpected: a soul masterpiece in 2022.
Soul, not r’n’b.
R’n’b is contemporary black pop. Oroza ain’t daft enough to think he’s making that. He’s making a grittily real dream of wholeness that comes from a broken white boy from Helsinki. That committment to his dream is all important and it utterly staggers me how his concision and control makes this record so emotionally devestating but ultimately redemptive : back in the day ‘Otherside’ would have - if not repelled me - simply not fitted in with my doctrinaire ideas about the past and its’ usability to forge a future. In this permanently present past, and permanently dated present, I find ‘Get On The Otherside’ utterly irresistible.
So will you. Highly recommended.