From its musical and linguistic phrases, even down its cover art, Half of What You See might be best defined as exquisite-corpse electro-jazz. Nothing is more easily contextualized by those with avant-garde proclivities than apparent cacophony. As such, launching a never-ending debate pitting structure against chaos is less interesting than trying to observe what Wrens, through free form and live instrumentation, actually attempt to birth out of their chaos. In this case, a sort of sci-fi spin on contemporary nihilism that would manage to be virtuosic, playful and relatable at the same time.
The first adjective is chased throughout the project by quirky electronics that are more often than not hammed up. The second seems to be taken for granted (but having fun playing and making the listener have fun are two very different things). As for the third one, relatability and authenticity are precisely the crux of what’s bothersome about frontman Ryan Easter’s emceeing.
There’s weighty potential for parody in a jazz head trying to blend gangsta rap with hermetic poetry in between trumpet improvs, one which is tapped into on many occasions by his catatonic flow and pompous lyricism. Too often, Easter sounds like a heavily sedated Self Jupiter who’s just pulled a bible out of the freestyle bag. Surely, it takes more than coating a spoken-word salad with sporadic uses of rap phraseology – “tooting asses” on ‘Snake’, pushing “wessons on opps” on ‘Charlie Parker’, the mumbled yes-yalling on ‘Crayola’ – to establish lineage to hip hop. It takes more than piling up surface-level experimentations to be credited as layered.
If you consider momentum-less velocity and snooty shapelessness an ideal pathway to the profound – or somehow an obscure byway to the hidden realities of our time – then you will find in this journey a credible alternative to “the cereal bowl of bullshittery that’s happening in the sounds of here and there right now” (‘Interlude’). For the rest of us, we might see it as a one-way ticket right to the center of said bowl.
