Genre is frustrating. On one hand, it makes for an easy generalization: Google “indie rock” and odds are you’ll find pictures of sensitive boys playing electric guitars in flannel. On the other hand, more iconoclastic and divergent works like Arcade Fire’s Funeral can lose their nuance when trapped in the same, broad term. It’s this desire to label — whether as cultural shorthand or a marketing tactic — that creates a strange tension. Generalize too much and you risk masking true innovation. But without genre at all, how would we discuss the music we love? Especially in a world turned over by a pandemic and a social justice movement, there aren’t simple names for things anymore.
Tov’s you don’t say sits very gently at the center of this impasse. A pop-rock record steeped in classical tradition, its complex orchestrations were recorded in pieces by over 15 isolated musicians writing and recording their own parts in their own homes. The high-concept baroque framework collides with incisive lyricism and subdued folk instrumentation, all expertly mixed by engineer Robb Davidson. It’s no small feat to mix the varying intonation of an orchestra remotely: This complex creation heeds attention purely for the elbow grease that went into it. It’s a miracle it exists at all.
Beyond the novelty of its construction, though, the music astounds. The opening track, “easy tbc,” trickles out slowly, inventing a harmonic framework before our eyes and then riffing on it. A gentle, classical piano arpeggio pulls us headfirst into tov’s world, swelling before being joined by a streaking distorted guitar line courtesy of Gregg Belisle-Chi. Right when the song starts to tilt towards an indie film score, tov’s vocals enter — his competent tenor sounding like Ed Droste at times, Peter Silberman at others — and shift the track back toward a more straightforward singer-songwriter tone. The only lyric (“when love runs cold, it’s easy to be cruel”) repeats multiple times, recalling “text setting,” a process employed by classical artists of putting simple poems or written works to music.
Further along, “patience” surprises, beginning with a loop of acoustic noise before introducing palm-muted guitar chords. With one minute to go, tov pulls everything away, save for a blistering fuzz bass. Decisions like these could feel too pastiche or random in someone else’s hands, but here, it feels generously musical. The tension between the contemporary and the traditional elements is captivating and undefinable, eluding a single term to do it justice (similar to Bo Burnham’s pandemic Trojan horse of emotion, “INSIDE”).
If we were to try and name these sounds, what would we call them? Any act daring enough to pull classical influences into rock or pop music usually did so theatrically — Pink Floyd, Queen, and, more recently, The Dear Hunter. Many of these acts ended up with a slapped-on “progressive” label, a term that’s initial meaning of “music with progressive ideas” gave way to the now-familiar images of long-haired bro-dudes pursuing musical onanism. This is certainly not tov, the nom de plure for Seattle composer Benjamin Marx (he assuredly looks like a short-haired theater kid.) you don’t say sits squarely between the musical worlds of classical and pop/rock, a child of both without fully embracing either.
“Orchestras and their institutions … are forced to traffic in tradition and an ever-changing cultural paradigm simultaneously,” said tov. “Talk about holding contradictory ideas!”
All of this tension can be heard throughout the record. Despite being a gentle listen, it’s constantly thumbing at its own edges. Listening to you don’t say feels like taking part in its creation live, almost improvisational yet completely measured. It argues for its existence even as it struggles against it. “one long goodbye” explores the realization of parental mortality over a nearly-blues folk jaunt. The album most directly confronts itself on “seeing themselves,” a track that deals with tov’s experience at the CHOP/CHAZ protests: “With a reality that immediate, making a record … felt inappropriate, detached, and intangible.”
Album closer “peeling skins,” a bucolic clarinet-led epilogue, is a fitting end to such an ambitious project. Over Steve Reich-esque pulsing minimalism and film score pianos, close vocal harmonies deliver dreamlike images: “Short days and heavy lips upon your eyes / you’re just a kid.” The fundamental wrestling of the album has not been resolved, but rather explored. It embodies the contradictions, rather than trying to shake them.
Tov’s music is perhaps the truest representation of our times: a not-readily-definable postmodern synthesis of restlessness fueled by a pandemic, a new revolution, and technological oversaturation. you don’t say reaches across time while also being entirely of 2021. Tov holds these opposing magnets as close as he can for each track, and the result is instinctually recognizable without a good label to define it. We only recognize it because we live inside it.
“I guess some things you can’t understand, you just feel, and that’s enough,” said tov.
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