Marcus Brown\u2019s voice is a crooner\u2019s voice, a baritone, emanating notes from some spot in his body deeper than his chest. Biologically speaking, this is impossible. But taking in his vocal, its dark timbre and real dimensionality, one feels perplexed and forced to come up with an explanation. Occasionally, Brown, who makes mesmerizing, lovelorn music under the name Nourished by Time, is a serenader reaching for the style of Jodeci or SWV\u2014sinewy, solicitous, but alien underneath the ad-libbing. He can be scarily operatic, showing flashes of Meat Loaf. He can be witty and deadpan, like Nate Dogg, or a croaker, like Keith Sweat if he had a feel for play, say, doing purposeful and provocative nasal singing. I haven\u2019t yet had the chance to watch Nourished by Time perform live onstage, but I am eager to see how he makes and inhabits a temporary world, given how much theatre and performance are already embedded in his singing.<\/p>\n
Nourished by Time, who is thirty-one, has just come out with his second full-length album, called \u201cThe Passionate Ones,\u201d a fitting title for a romantic who is working out, with each output, how he might survive the culture of soul-killing cynicism he was born into. All around him, there is misery and hoarded wealth, work and little love. Not everyone wants to\u2014or can\u2014assimilate spiritually. A preoccupation of Brown, who calls himself a songwright, and who identifies as a leftist, is the twinned sufferings of the worker and the lover, both desperate for refuge, or, perhaps, more bleakly, for a release from the systems in which they cannot succeed. \u201cMax Potential,\u201d a song on the new record, exploits self-improvement gospel to explore this maladjustment. An echoing, disembodied voice asks, as a synth drifts in, \u201cYou\u2019re on earth to maximize your potential, know what I\u2019m sayin\u2019?\u201d Later, Nourished by Time makes a proclamation, supported by a grungy guitar: \u201cIf I\u2019m going to go insane, at least I\u2019m loved by you.\u201d The title of the album is a reference to Prince\u2019s \u201cThe Beautiful Ones\u201d\u2014a song that some have interpreted as a veiled plea to Vanity, Prince\u2019s muse. Nourished by Time, though, is channelling a loftier, spiritual reading\u2014the passionate ones are a tribe, the artists perforce.<\/p>\n
Brown was born and raised in Baltimore. It is a myth city, in the way that Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia are myth cities: they live in the minds of foreigners as magical and troubled dens, places that outsiders feel a need to understand. The presence of Baltimore is strong in Brown\u2019s music; one gets a sense of his roots without even reading his interviews. Earlier releases\u2014for a few years, he made guitar-driven music under different names, first Riley with Fire, and then Mother Marcus\u2014show shades of Baltimore breakbeats, driving and frantic, undergirding his indie sound. \u201cThe Passionate Ones\u201d pays homage to the Black club pioneer Rod Lee\u2019s classic \u201cDance My Pain Away.\u201d And, in his lyrics, Brown often evokes the melancholia of the post-industrial environment: \u201cYoung breathing in them toxins \/ used to have a third place, but now they have no options,\u201d he sings on \u201cHell of a Ride,\u201d a song from the 2024 EP \u201cCatching Chickens.\u201d<\/p>\n
An interviewer, from Cult Classic magazine, asked Brown, last year, if he had grown up going to D.I.Y. shows in Baltimore\u2014the city of JPEGMafia, Beach House, Animal Collective. \u201cNo, honestly,\u201d Brown replied. \u201cI was a really sad, depressed kid that, like, never left the house.\u201d Much of his early musical education took place on YouTube. When Brown was young, he would play around with his father\u2019s old guitar; one day, his father noticed a popped string. His dad asked if he wanted to learn how to play the instrument, for real, and he took his son to a pawn shop to buy a used guitar, and got him lessons. Within a couple of years, Brown, who also played in his high school\u2019s marching band, was good enough to get into Berklee College of Music. Notwithstanding one instructor, who encouraged idiosyncrasy, Brown felt that the institution wanted him to make formulaic pop music. So he left. He spent the next few years producing music while holding down regular jobs\u2014in construction; at Barnes & Noble.<\/p>\n
Pop is no pejorative to Brown, or to the listeners who love how he puts synth pop in dialogue with rock music and R. & B. I\u2019m not the first to note that he can seem like an emissary from the early nineties, a pupil of DeVant\u00e9 Swing, bringing the ghost of that R. & B. subgenre to a breathier, freakier fresh register. One thing that makes his work so attractive is the quality of artisanship; the structures (a tinny introductory piano, joined by a bass line and swelling chords) are authoritative\u2014we are in the hands of a disciplined producer\u2014but the atmosphere he creates feels spacious, big enough to hold any manner of high emotional sensitivity: grief, elation. \u201cWe want to hear the pain music,\u201d the writer and chronicler of Baltimore club culture Lawrence Burney once said. Nourished by Time makes lush pain music. I\u2019d been put onto Brown a few years ago, around the time that he\u2019d d\u00e9buted as Nourished by Time\u2014a reference to the canonical indie band Guided by Voices. For Brown, the allusion is an unjaded embrace of the lo-fi evolution they brought\u2014he is an internet-era artist who doesn\u2019t feel the need to shirk genre forebears. It\u2019s so confrontational, the earnestness of Brown\u2019s project. He is also indexing the purity of artist suffering: the years spent in the private place of creation, tinkering and toiling, praying that something true emerges. \u201cErotic Probiotic 2,\u201d released in 2023, is a memoir-ish work about a heartbreak, but the plaintiveness is turned outward. Nourished by Time is a giver. \u201cGotta show you more, gotta give you more than using words,\u201d he sings, on the song \u201cSoap Party,\u201d from that record.<\/p>\n
Brown has spent the past decade or so trying out cities: Los Angeles, London, back to Baltimore\u2014where he lived, for a time, in his parents\u2019 basement, and recorded most of \u201cErotic Probiotic 2\u201d\u2014and, finally, New York City. A neat narrative of \u201cmaking it\u201d is tempting. He\u2019s signed now to XL Recordings, a coveted indie label. Having once supported acts such as Vagabon and Dry Cleaning on the road, he\u2019s gearing up for a solo tour this fall. Tyler, the Creator recently gave him a shout-out in an interview. \u201cHell of a Ride\u201d was chosen by Spotify as one of the best songs of the year\u2014a blessing and a curse. (\u201cIt\u2019s way busier of a song than I would really write now,\u201d he told Rolling Stone, recently.) He knows he\u2019s on the precipice of genuine fame, but Brown doesn\u2019t seem to find wealth, the disconnection that it brings, a generative muse. \u201cI just want enough money that I can be comfortable, raise a family, buy a house, and start a business,\u201d he has said.<\/p>\n
It is one thing to be a musician. It is another to work as one. A track I listen to again and again on \u201cThe Passionate Ones\u201d is \u201c9 2 5.\u201d Performed from a third-person perspective, the perspective of the blues, Nourished by Time spins an old-fashioned yarn about a man working a restaurant job and writing ballads at night. The mood is bleak; the man is high. But in the second verse the emotional charge changes to forthright, exhortative, almost gospel: \u201cMay they multiply you \/ May the river guide you.\u201d Another favorite of mine is \u201cWhen the War Is Over,\u201d which might be one of the more beautiful songs to come out this year. A love song set to a boom-bap beat, it comes near the album\u2019s end, and it acts like a cleanse to the agony and need that had preceded it: \u201cBaby if you love me, I\u2019ll surrender.\u201d \u201cThe Passionate Ones\u201d catches your weariness, and, with a dreamer\u2019s stubbornness and irrationality, asks if you would consider transforming it, even for a while. It\u2019s got that fever, this album, the American tears-on-the-dance-floor, we-gon\u2019-make-it energy. It\u2019s what you want to listen to, during this summer of divided consciousness, and in the colder seasons to come.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marcus Brown\u2019s voice is a crooner\u2019s voice, a baritone, emanating notes from some spot in his body deeper…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":106850,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[63542,64,63,134,136,36005],"class_list":{"0":"post-106849","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-album-reviews","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-musicians"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}