Market Well I Asked You a Question

The reliably inventive songwriting project Market is an outlet for producer Nate Mendelsohn's obsessive questions and answers, recollections of conversation and interior monologues. Well I Asked You A Question, his second release for Western Vinyl, is a giant leap inward; it brims with a humorous, neurotic candor only ever outmatched by a wide and colorful sonic palette. Calling the album "a personal vision of pop music," Mendelsohn blends internet eclecticism, adventurous orchestration, and hyper-focused production to build a cohesive whole from the fragments of his curiosity.Since writing 2022's The Consistent Brutal Bullshit Gong, Mendelsohn has become more entrenched in the Brooklyn, NY music community, producing the recent Frankie Cosmos and Dougie Poole albums, performing in Vagabon and Sam Evian, and recording with Yaeji and Lady Lamb. These experiences with adventurous artists likely resonate with fans of records like Pet Sounds, Fantasma, Insignificance, Blonde, or XO. Well I Asked You A Question's aforementioned sonic palette wonderfully melds the physical and the synthetic: sampled orchestras duel with real orchestras ("Fantasy"), a robot's spoken word duets with a choir of humans ("Around"), and blasts of noise "solo" over traditional rock instrumentation ("Rachel's Getting Married").As he cultivates the most distinctive Market record to date, what feels most subversive this go-around is the lyrical perspective Mendelsohn has honed. A puzzle and language aficionado-he pours a surplus of energy into the wordy and empathetic songs on Well I Asked You A Question. The lyrical topics are filtered through Mendelsohn's obsessive tendencies, sometimes even becoming the subject itself. Their consequences may be small, the language plain speech, and that's the point. Take "Apple," a recollection of his dad's frustration at his twin sister arriving six-minutes late, spun out into a study of nature and nurture, and the magical meaning he assigns to being six-minutes her junior. He wonders aloud: "how could I not see by now? / the frightening percentile of gifts the apple gave / and sure the curses / the bruised and broken edges where the fruit is at it's worst is / just part of how we're made." On "Water Spilling Test," described as "a breakup song, zoomed way in," Mendelsohn meditates on how destructively a glass of water could be spilled, what can be ruined in a moment's time. "Sertraline" is a rushing fever dream about "self-mythologizing, art making, archiving, and understanding yourself through the stories you cling to, mutate, and sometimes reject." As the song culminates and builds to an orchestral eddy, Mendelsohn balances everything with a coda that starts with a playful nod to Radiohead: "a pig in a cage on klonopin / baby are you listening? / I don't have that peace of mind anymore / obviously I'm tougher than / even just a year ago / dicing up your ego / what a bore."Though many of the sounds on the record are augmented and fractured, Mendelsohn still worked with the Market band of Stephen Becker, Natasha Bergman, and Duncan Standish to build out the songs. He wanted "musical accidents with frayed edges left in-still a group of people, in a room, playing songs." Beyond the core band, world-expanding contributions came from Katie von Schleicher, Mike Haldeman (Moses Sumney, Alto Palo), Justin Felton (L'Rain, Strugglin'), Rose Droll (Feist, Art Feynman) and Helen Newby with engineering by Adam Hirsch (Sam Amidon, Stephen Steinbrink).Well I Asked You a Question is ambitious and complex, but Mendelsohn tempers those goals by aiming at heart, toward the very human.