Waltzing Tilde

After a long stretch of comic set-pieces, this is where the record turns most serious about its craft, and the joke goes fully philosophical. Two voices, a tenor and an alto, trade near-spoken lines over a waltz that keeps threatening to fall apart: piano and marimba lock into a three-note figure at the top, then the marimba quietly refuses to change while everything above it drifts, splinters into 5/4, and finally staggers through a few bars of 7/8 where the meter nearly loses its footing entirely. The whole thing is an argument about sameness that keeps dissolving under its own logic. ‘We have the same car,’ he offers; ‘we don’t have the same car,’ she answers, and by the closing verse the only thing left that’s identical is the pronoun. It’s structurally the most ambitious thing in his catalog since ‘Outlandia,’ and if the payoff lives in the design more than in any single hook, that’s the point: the marimba holding one wrong note under a full-ensemble unison is worth the wait. A grower, and the clearest signal that the closer is going to ask you to think rather than to sing along.