Jeff Tobias’s One Hundredfold Now In This Age begins at its paradoxically lowest yet bubbliest point. “Burn the American flag, one hundred times a day,” insists the Queens, New York-based composer and multi-instrumentalist, his catchy vocal melody supported by a fusiony dance of keyboard phrases, clarinet textures, and saxophone leads. While framed as Tobias’s reaction to the US-sponsored genocide in Gaza, opener ‘END IT’ is ambiguous, infected with an undertone of doomerism – a type of contemporary Weltschmerz that pervades leftist nooks of social media.
However, over the remaining nine cuts, Tobias, helped by drummer Scott Smith and a sprawling gallery of collaborators, pushes back against this destructive narrative – in no small part consciously engineered by the grotesque everyday spectacles of the Trump administration. Like the “No Kings” protests that took place just a few days after the album’s release, the music is imbued with a spirit that acknowledges the insanity of the US – and therefore, global – zeitgeist, but advocates for solidarity and collective action in place of surrender. In support, Tobias’s compositions veer closer to the Bob Mould school of protest songs, filled with hooks and big choruses, rather than the combative jazz and psych rock of his former band, Sunwatchers. At a distance from his other groups (Modern Nature, Thee Reps), Tobias draws freely from a wide range of influences, pop and rock alike, with a particular interest in their artsier, proggier offshoots in the vein of Brian Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain/Another Green World era.
‘Gimme Coherence’ takes a nervous, almost danceable pulse and fashions it in the image of Deerhoof’s idiosyncratic rock, helped by Wendy Eisenberg’s serrated electric guitar that grunts and thrashes and sparks with spite even when surrounded by suspiciously joyful synths and some of the bleakest lyrics on the album. “No one gets to go home, some invisible hand spins the globe.” Meanwhile, ‘Arp (Burning Property)’ sees Tobias illustrate Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil with noisy, Wolf Eyes-adjacent experimental pop and deadpan spoken word. Here, Mari Maurice’s screeching violin licks rub against burbly arpeggios and swelling brass, providing a perfect soundtrack for government agents to sow chaos and death – yesterday abroad, today at home – and lead boring, normal lives. “I bind their wrists and blindfold them,” becomes as mundane an activity as “I sit on the couch and deal with the email stuff, I stretch”.
Elsewhere, ‘Closed System’ evokes a Ben LaMar Gay miniature, with its expansive, ambient-coded saxophone licks. And Krissy Battalene’s Frusciante-meets-Mascis elongated guitar chords narrow the scope of ‘Letter To A Friend In Trouble’ to a mellower, intimate setting. Throughout, Tobias balances the baroque, saturating instincts of chamber pop with urgent, to-the-point rock segments, the romantic swells of plucked and bowed strings on ‘Political Solution’ or ‘The Scam’ tempered by the almost post-punk gestures of ‘I Feel Hated’ that hug Tobias’s soulful cadence with hard-driven indietronica à la Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
For all the rage, anti-imperialism, and resistance scattered throughout One Hundredfold, Tobias closes the album with a song that is almost like a prayer. “When I’m at my lowest, I stay alive for the family, when you’re at your lowest, stay alive for me,” he sings. Defeat, irony, and nihilism transforming into a step forward – then another, and another, to the rhythm of sublimely subtle shakers, clarinet melodies, and pizzicato strings. While perhaps only hesitantly hopeful, ‘Don’t Quit The Band’ shows that, for now at least, it might be enough to see another day.
