Music Review: This Is All Yours

The great irony of alt-J’s new album lies in its title. While This Is All Yours succeeds on a variety of levels—it’s absolutely gorgeous, for one—it fails to do the one thing truly great music unconditionally must do: develop a strong emotional connection with the listener.

alt-J falls into the uncanny valley between uninspired electronic music and sheer brilliance; it’s as if someone programmed a computer to compose an album specifically designed to challenge and delight the millennial human mind. The instrumentation on This Is All Yours is varied and stimulating. The textures, sublime. I could go on about the vocals, the progressions, the unexpected yet perfect samples—but I will spare you. Because while alt-J has the ability to craft music that sounds just right, at many points in the album, something feels a bit wrong.

Take album highlight “Every Other Freckle.” When lead vocalist Joe Newman croons “turn you inside out and lick you like a crisp packet,” it’s supposed to sound sensual and aphrodisiac. Instead, it comes off as unnerving and lewd. With "This Is All Yours," alt-J takes all that you cherished about music in the past fifteen years and boils it down into a highly concentrated, entrancing, and beautiful hour-long package. Are those echoes of Explosions in the Sky, James Blake and Fleet Foxes in the same song? Yep, and you’re barely five minutes into the freakin’ album.

You can’t quite call what alt-J is doing appropriation because all that music belongs to them too. But that doesn’t mean they can take everything exciting and interesting about music in this millennium, recombine it into something that sounds wonderful but feels unsettling, even vulgar, and call it “yours.”

So why doesn’t it feel like "This Is All Yours" is mine? I’m a music fan in the 21st century! Fleet Foxes, LCD Soundsystem, Klaxons—those are all mine. Many fans of alt-J claim that to criticize their music is to criticize experimentation and pretension. I’m certainly not arguing against experimentation. If anything, "This Is All Yours" could use much more of it. After many of the songs, you find yourself wishing that alt-J had pushed themselves just a bit more, had pushed the song just a bit farther. It’s a huge shame that none of these songs make it past the five-and-a-half-minute mark. And I’m not arguing against pretentiousness or self-indulgence, either; Radiohead has plenty of both and composes some of the most vulnerable and emotionally titillating music ever. This is an argument against artificiality. It’s an argument against aesthetically rich but emotionally anemic music. You could eat five-star meals at the world’s greatest restaurants prepared by their most skilled chefs for the rest of your life, but you’ll never satisfy that craving for your grandmother’s chicken soup.

Admittedly, there are moments of real emotional triumph buried underneath all of alt-J’s posturing. “Pusher” features only simple instrumentation and tastefully layered vocals and, boy, does it hit home. It’s soft, subtle, and lovely but most importantly, it feels human. Slow-burner “Choice Kingdom” works as well, even as it rips off the earthly-yet-surreal wailing of Fleet Foxes, Animal Collective and every other freak-folk outfit of the past fifteen years.

So then, to whom does this album really belong? Perhaps it belongs to history, to the kids thirty or three hundred years from now who want to know what music sounded like in the early years of this century. Could "This Is All Yours" be our "Sgt. Pepper" or "Nevermind?" It is too early to tell. Undoubtedly, this is an important album. alt-J certainly sound like now; they sound like us. But they do not feel like us. Until alt-J can figure out how to do that, their music will never truly be ours.