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No Album Left Behind: Department Builds an Emotional Arc on Dumb Angel

Melbourne, Australia musician Adam Kyriakou’s plunderphonics opus is short, but complete.

By Eric R. Danton  |  December 19, 2023 | 12:30pm
Music Reviews Department
No Album Left Behind: Department Builds an Emotional Arc on Dumb Angel
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There’s a particular art to plunderphonics, the practice of taking samples of other music and stitching them together into something new, cohesive and, ideally, compelling. Not only must practitioners have a clear idea about how they want to put together their musical collages, it’s helpful to have an encyclopedic mental catalog of the sounds that will get them there. After all, there’s no jamming when you’re building with samples, no “Get Back” moment where Paul McCartney messes around on bass for two minutes and comes up with an iconic song. Moments of serendipity in sampling are the result of remembering just the right bit of the right song, and slotting it into the right place in the work you’re creating.

Adam Kyriakou has a knack for it on Dumb Angel. It’s the first collection of songs from the Melbourne, Australia, musician, who records under the name Department. Though musical collage artists often draw from obscure and vintage soul, jazz and psychedelic records, Department pulls from more recent influences: there are snippets here of tracks by Ariana Grande, Spiritualized and J-Kwon, the early 2000s rapper known for his 2004 hit “Tipsy.” A slowed-down version of the trunk-rattling beat from “Tipsy” forms the backbone of Department’s track “Dreams of Youth,” but rhythm is a secondary concern on Dumb Angel. Kryiakou’s primary focus here is creating an emotional arc over the course of seven tracks here.

Opener “Overture” builds into a swell of strings and vocals lifted from a 1994 recording of a traditional folk song, “Kalimanko Denko,” by the women’s choir Bulgarian Voices Angelite (Department isn’t fully immune to the lure of the obscure). Scene set, the album takes flight on the next song, the title track, which introduces a boom-bap beat and a huge bassline that underpins layers of instrumentation and vocals, some of which are shifted in pitch.

It’s tempting to focus on sample-spotting, but more rewarding to get lost in the confluence of new contexts that Department creates on these tracks. “Dumb Angel” slides into “Dreams of Youth,” which builds into a soaring finale. A lull follows on the next track, “Distant Voices, Still Lives (Part I),” the first installment of a sonic triptych, as Department shifts through parts of other songs, sometimes abruptly, as if he’s spinning the dial on an old transistor radio. The atmospherics build again on “Distant Voices, Still Lives (Part II),” thanks to the combination of Mariah Carey, a meta sample of Spiritualized borrowing from Elvis Presley and, to round it all out, a snippet of Parliament’s “Oh Lord, Why Lord/Prayer” that imbues the track with a gospel-like sense of catharsis that spills into the third part.

By the last track, “Oh Lord,” the journey feels complete, as if Department has wrapped up a narrative that ends in a sort of exhausted triumph: you feel wrung out, but exhilarated, and the crackly voice and muted keyboards offer a gentle come-down as they fade out after a minute and a half. The whole thing stretches only to 22 minutes, but there’s a sense of completeness on Dumb Angels that makes it a journey worth taking more than once.

Eric R. Danton has been contributing to Paste since 2013. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and Pitchfork, among other publications. Follow him on Mastodon or visit his website.

 
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