The Love Of Your Life

Unknown Mortal Orchestra “Ur Life One Night”

Unknown Mortal Orchestra started out as a band no one knew anything about, and that lack of information only made their music feel more strange and misplaced in time. But now that UMO has a third album, all that has changed. Ruban Nielson, who essentially IS the band, was so open in this interview with Pitchfork that he’s on the opposite end of the spectrum from where he started. A lot of the interview, which feels far more like a segment on This American Life or a Modern Love column than a profile of a rock musician, is about he and his wife exploring a polyamorous relationship with a much younger woman from Japan. This experiment and the resulting emotional fallout is the basis for pretty much everything on his new album Multi-Love. (Funny how a title that seemed ambiguous at first now looks so totally literal.) I’ve had an advance copy of the record for a little while and, as with the previous UMO records, enjoyed it greatly on a purely musical level. Nielson is so great with melodic, rhythm, texture, and ambient vibe that it’s easy to just kinda gloss over lyrical content. But going back over the record with this context in mind is a revelation – the songs are all stuck in a weird space between bliss and anxiety. “Ur Life One Night” in particular shifted a lot in my mind, with my brain focusing in on all the question marks in the lyrics. This is about what I’d expect this unusual emotional situation to be like: Exciting and sorta simple on the face of it, but complicated and confusing in execution. This music just sounds like trying to feel relaxed and groovy and happy while constantly negotiating and dealing with neuroses.

Buy it from Amazon.