The big iridescent heart on the cover of last year’s Fontaines DC album, titled Romance. The even bigger papier mache heart on the cover of ‘Grandiose Love’, the recent single from Zoee. Jarvis Cocker reminding us that we’ve “got to have love” on this year’s new Pulp album, titled More. The unabashed pop of Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter. And the title of the new album from Baltimore’s Marcus Brown, aka Nourished By Time: The Passionate Ones. Love – or at least some heartfelt expression of feeling – is all around us.
It’s not necessarily that Brown makes music that sounds maximalist or wholehearted, although the new album does inherit, in its own warped way, some of the 1980s’ most bombastic sonic traits. Lyrically, though, The Passionate Ones wears its heart on its sleeve, an earnest celebration of collective spirit over the introspective individualism that dominates much of modern pop. This championing of love, community, and a desire for more surely comes as a reaction to the pandemic, as well as the austerity and social inequality that’s overshadowed the years before and since. It’s hard to find a roof over your head that’s stable and affordable, hard to find a job that pays enough, hard to afford food. Hard to live in a war-torn world that skews ever farther right, the chasm between rich and poor threatening to swallow us all, especially the younger generations. Basic existence is tough – let alone basic existence as an artist.
“Working restaurants by day, writing love songs by night,” Brown sings on ‘9 2 5’, a track with piano hooks worthy of the Scissor Sisters, written for those juggling a day job with a creative one. “If you can bomb Palestine, you can bomb Mondawmin,” he spits on the urgent ‘Baby Baby’, referencing a neighbourhood in his home city of Baltimore that sports a giant shopping mall. “Buy anything, just buy it fucking often / Yeah, turn your fucking brain off.”
The Passionate Ones is a reaction – or antidote – to tough times and drudgery: an album dedicated to workers that wields love as a weapon against oppression, racism, and working class conditions that get increasingly impossible with each day. These are songs that stand at the picket line alongside the likes of poet and essayist Anne Boyer, who wrote in her profound cancer memoir The Undying about how working people are forced to “sell the hours of their lives to survive their lives.”
Brown knows what it’s like to sell the hours of his life to survive: he’s spent more than a decade working in menial jobs, such as bagging groceries at Whole Foods or building fences. But while he was placing kefir, kombucha, and alfalfa sprouts into paper bags for the residents of Los Angeles (Brown moved there for a spell to further his music career), he was also busy building an identity as a musician and producer, an identity that became Nourished By Time in 2019. The moniker is a nod to the years spent grafting away at music and the enrichment that brings (it’s also a nod to Guided By Voices, one of Brown’s favourite bands). Now he’s 30, and his lo-fi electronic sound – bedroom pop only in the sense that he honed it in his bedroom – has achieved cult status. He signed to XL Recordings last year after the success of his 2023 debut album Erotic Probiotic 2.
On The Passionate Ones, Brown inhabits a space somewhere between 1980s pop and 1990s R&B, a site he excavates with thoroughly modern tools. The production is layered, dense with samples and wonky earworms, all carried along on the lazy river of his muddied Barry White baritone. The album sounds rich, even if the people Brown sings about (and for) are not. The songs themselves are brain-swirls of half-remembered fragments, dreams, bits of song, ephemera that repeats in your mind against the everyday wash of thought.
You’re captured in its sticky, squelchy synth web from start to finish. Opener ‘Automatic Love’ builds to a satisfying bass wobble, ‘Crazy People’ builds to an even more satisfying, juddering synth breakdown, while lead single ‘Max Potential’ operates like a self-help mantra delivered via thick, twisting guitar and distorted melody. The aforementioned glittering piano and lovably zany production on ‘9 2 5’ beams through like a break in the clouds, like a rare moment of unbridled joy in a life dominated by work.
Sometimes the web feels a little too sticky – there’s not much variation in these songs. But that’s no doubt intentional. Brown was inspired by Jay-Z’s The Blueprint and Kanye’s College Dropout and Late Registration “because they were all about teaching people and giving them a map for how to succeed and achieve their dreams. They’re very dreamer-based albums.” These are not people dreaming to escape, though: rather dreaming their way towards a better life.
Given the subject matter, there’s a real danger of earnestness run amok. But even on ‘Jojo’, a laidback funk track featuring Birmingham rapper Tony Bontana, Bontana’s verse borders on overly sincere, but that’s somehow rescued by his simple final line: “we hard-wired for love.”
“If we all strike now / the gravy train stop,” Brown points out on ‘Baby Baby’. It’s refreshing to hear leftist arguments that aren’t bellowed from the laddish likes of Idles, but rather from off-kilter electronic pop made by a Black artist from Baltimore.
“Then they use the hours they haven’t sold to get their lives ready for selling,” Boyer continues in ‘The Undying’, “and the hours after that to do the same for the other lives they love.” Despite the circumstances, love endures, has to. Love is all around us, and Nourished By Time wants to remind us to let it show.
