Mulberry Violence

Trevor Powers made three albums as Youth Lagoon and ended the project in early 2016. Mulberry Violence, released on 17 August 2018, is his first record under his own name, and he chose the name for its exposure. “There’s nothing to hide behind,” he told Billboard. He also paid for all of it, from the studio to the videos, and released it on his own new label, Baby Halo, because he did not want anyone in the industry asking to change it.

He wrote it over about two years, much of that time travelling. Between projects he studied jazz and classical music, wrote poetry and built song sketches, and the press notes named three visual artists behind its social and spiritual themes: Francis Bacon, Sister Gertrude Morgan and Harry Clarke. He also cited the composer Laurie Spiegel. The recording happened at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, an hour from El Paso in the middle of a 2,300-acre pecan orchard, where, by his account, there was nothing to do but work. Jason Kingsland engineered and added production, Stuart White, best known for his work with Beyoncé, mixed it, and Joe LaPorta mastered it at Sterling Sound. The title comes from the tree. Mulberries, Powers wrote, wait until the frost has gone and then bud overnight: “They are everything we’re not.”

The opener has the clearest origin story. Early on, Powers visited the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic, a small church decorated with the bones of some 40,000 people, and described trembling in front of it, then a strange peace. He started “XTQ Idol” late that night. In NPR’s description it sets piano against static and cut-up vocals, and Loud and Quiet noted that the first sound on the record is his strained scream. “Dicegame” went through six other versions before one felt honest to him, and he pointed to his favourite painter, Bacon, who described a work as “one continuous accident mounting on top of another”.

The band behind him is small. Micah Stevens plays bass, drums and extra keyboards, Kaitlyn Figgs guitar and programming, Nina Figgs Rhodes, Tiffany Emerson trumpet, and Rob Moose arranged and played the strings, with Rob Burger adding more on “Common Hoax”. “Playwright”, the first song out, in May, is a lament for someone gone, built on sparse keys; Pitchfork heard something like a zither in it. “Ache” sets a lyric about violent abuse over a quiet trip-hop pulse until the strings cut in. “Squelch” pushes his voice so far down into the treatment that Pitchfork heard a ghoul. NPR singled out the groove of “Clad In Skin” as the catchiest on the record, with horns and drums that Stereogum traced to 1990s trip-hop. Powers released the songs in pairs through the summer, so seven of the ten were out before the album.

Critics were mostly positive, and Metacritic’s average from eight reviews is 73. DIY gave it four stars out of five. Pitchfork, at 7.4, reached for Portishead, Bon Iver’s 22, A Million and King Krule, and Jayson Greene heard harmony holding up even the harshest noise. PopMatters, Exclaim and Loud and Quiet all landed on 7 out of 10, and Loud and Quiet named “Ache” a highlight. The doubts were about the voice and the instincts behind it. AllMusic found the distortion on his singing sometimes worked against the songs, Exclaim picked “Pretend It’s Confetti” as the weakest track, and The 405, at 5.5, thought he was struggling to trust his own instincts.

Mulberry Violence is lovely and unruly at the same time, and that is the idea, not a compromise. The title sets a patient tree against impatient people, and the music does the same thing at the level of sound: piano and strings under static, a scream that opens the record and two quiet songs that close it. The complaint about the buried voice is fair, but the burying is part of the subject. It is a break made on his own money and his own terms, and it mostly holds. He made one more album under his own name, Capricorn, in 2020, and brought Youth Lagoon back in 2023 with Heaven Is a Junkyard.