My Idea Laugh Through the Tears on CRY MFER
Lily Konigsberg and Nate Amos push each other’s penchants for idiosyncratic indie pop on their relentlessly playful debut LP
Imagine, if you will, walking into one of the cavernous ruin bars that have famously dotted the streets of Budapest since the Soviet Union’s collapse. An abandoned warehouse that’s become a glittering, strobe-lit maze, it offers room after room of bold, albeit sometimes clashing delights—say, a cowboy bar next to where the Depeche Mode cover band is playing. As you go along your night, all these lights strung about this tombstone of a troubled past give the impression of something silly and strange and over the top and, unmistakably, a little sad. This is a bit what listening to CRY MFER is like.
The first proper LP from duo Lily Konigsberg (of Palberta and solo acclaim) and Nate Amos (Water from Your Eyes, This is Lorelei), My Idea’s CRY MFER follows up on the promise of last year’s That’s My Idea EP. It’s a record bursting at the seams with brash styles and sounds that, despite being all over the map, feel unified by its creators’ obvious glee in committing to whatever musical impulse crosses their minds—be it trance-y synth-pop, folk tunes bordering on alt-country territory, a twee ditty on the piano, or some mixture of these and more.
Well, it’s unified by that and the crucible of bubbling resentment, horniness, self-loathing and infatuation in which the duo formed these songs. The band was in a self-described spiral during the recording, caught somewhere between a volatile codependent entanglement and a bender that left them freshly sober best friends by the end of it. This is right in the listener’s face on a track like “Breathe You,” which Lily describes as singing while “blindingly sad” and “genuinely devastated,” while Nate’s pitched-up voice sounds like an insomniac robot as he croons, “Something in the way you move / Just makes me want to shave my head” and, “Yeah, I know it’s kind of cool but still I fucked this up” over a minimalist take on a slow-jam beat. It’s trying to capture an emotionally raw moment in a way that sounds, in spite of everything I’ve said, kind of fun.