It's Immaterial

Black Marble started in Brooklyn with Chris Stewart and Ty Kube, and in 2012 it put out the Weight Against the Door EP and the album A Different Arrangement on Hardly Art. By 2016 Kube was gone. It’s Immaterial, released on October 14, 2016, is the project’s first record for Ghostly International, and by the label’s account Stewart wrote, recorded, mixed and performed all of it himself. Most of the coverage was about his move from New York to Los Angeles. The record was made before he left.

Stewart has said he wrote it over about a year in New York, sick of the city and unwilling to move until it was done. He stopped seeing people and worked on nothing else. If the album feels pent up, he told the Observer, “it’s because that’s how I felt.” He usually starts a song from the rhythm section, with a bass melody, and he kept several versions of these songs, some with different lyrics, before he handed it in. The change he wanted was in the sound. His earlier records were soaked in reverb, which he calls an easy way to make anything sound good, and this time he aimed for pop structures and melodies that “get in your head”. The label’s notes say the vocals were pushed forward, with Robert Palmer’s early Island years as the model.

“Iron Lung” was the first single, premiered in July 2016. Stewart wrote it coming out of a case of pneumonia that kept him in hospital for two weeks and, in his words, “almost killed me”, and he wrote it as if no one would ever hear it. It opens on a bassline alone. Before it comes “Interdiction”, 71 seconds long, which SLUG described as a muffled scream set among scraps of effects. “Self Guided Tours” borrows a line from Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart”, “A Million Billion Stars” opens on “Hold the place in the line”, and “Collene”, the longest track at 4:42, closes the album.

“Woods” got a video from Theo Sixou, who had made the clip for “A Great Design” in 2013: people running through a forest, sometimes stopping to speak to the camera. Stewart said it fit the song’s subject, the tension of already knowing how something ends and still not getting out of it, “that liminal space between wanting and doing”. He is also a graphic designer and Black Marble’s art director. The cover is Logan White’s photograph of a woman in a black suit in front of a pale green house, whom Stewart called “the Patron Saint of the record”. He went through about 20 versions of the type alone before stripping it back to a thick black border and a plain serif.

The reviews were warm rather than excited, and Metacritic averaged 72 from six of them. AllMusic’s Tim Sendra gave it four stars, finding it back on “the gloomy, muted sound” of the first record. Drowned in Sound and PopMatters both gave it 7 out of 10, and Ian King at PopMatters found no big changes but “a little more endearing color and candor”. The Skinny’s Joe Goggins was cooler: he liked a mood that never lets up but found the sound so uniform it could turn airless, and named “Frisk” as a build with no payoff. Several critics put the warmth down to Los Angeles. Stewart rejected that: most of it was written in Brooklyn, and the change came from wanting to try something new.

Goggins has the fairer point. By Stewart’s account and the label’s, he did what he set out to do: the voice is closer, the reverb thinner, and no song runs much past four and a half minutes. But eleven tracks in under 37 minutes, two of them sketches under two minutes, stay inside the narrow lines nearly every review described, and its most vivid details are the stories around it: the hospital song, the forest video, the woman on the cover. It is careful and consistent, and it holds back. Stewart said as much himself three years later, promoting Bigger Than Life: on It’s Immaterial he had been more focused on how he wanted to be perceived.