The second album from the enigmatic duo is equally nauseating and joyous, like binging on several decades of euphoric pop and hurling it onto the floor of a Tilt-A-Whirl.
Macula Dog didn’t set out to be freaks. The enigmatic New York duo, who’ve become known for stumbling pop experiments in off-kilter time signatures, performed live with sculpturesque puppets strapped to their backs, have repeatedly claimed that their music isn’t meant to sound like it’s falling apart. The delirious, queasy tracks that the pair issued over the last decade are the result of a kind of compositional naivety: “We’re not musicians,” they once said in an interview. “I don’t know what a note is.”
As a result, Macula Dog’s music is led by instinct and interpersonal chemistry, following wherever their unique pop sensibility and their haphazard collection of drum pads, synthesizers, and salvaged “garbage” leads. Early records, like their 2015 self-titled release for New York abstract pop label Haord, drew deserved comparisons to previous generations of electro-weirdos like Devo and the Residents, but that was never their aim. They told Vice in 2015 that they mostly just wanted to sound like T. Rex. As they began to work on their second album, Orange 2, they doubled down on this goal, attempting to make, as they put it in a press release, “a ‘proper’ record…with a distinct, great lead singer, and music you could dance to.”
They failed, by their own admission. That much is clear from the moment an insectoid voice enters on Orange 2’s opening title track, singing clipped non-sequiturs about beverages that disintegrate the koozies that contain them. Onomatopoeic electronics sproing and splort and splash around the vocal melodies in delicately balanced chaos. If Orange 2 mirrors pop music, it’s only in its dedication to too-much-ness. Macula Dog dip and dive between icy 1980s synth-pop, the rhythmic precision of krautrock, the noisy disaffection of no wave, and more vertiginous sounds—“Go Green” sounds equally like a dial-up internet connection stuttering to life and Strawberry Jam-era Animal Collective. It’s nauseating and joyous in equal measure, as if the duo had binged on several decades’ worth of euphoric pop then hurled it onto the floor of a Tilt-A-Whirl. They sum up their philosophy with a one-liner on “The Novice”: “It’s cool to be confused.”
Despite the delirium, Orange 2 illustrates the group’s formal ambitions. Off-kilter and strange as each melody is, they all snap together into a kind of locomotion. For every careening synth line, there’s carefully sequenced percussion keeping it on the rails. Tracks like “Neosporin” roll from one section to another seemingly unpredictably, but deft synth flourishes and recurring vocal affectations lend each track a sense of continuity and purpose. It might be too disjointed for a sing-along, but you can follow the logic in a way that feels even more satisfying than a traditional verse-chorus-verse.
Like watching a Rube Goldberg machine in operation, you can never quite be sure how one component of Orange 2 will tumble into the next, but through some miracle of physics, momentum, or magic, it always does. See the way “Smart Man Do” jump cuts from chattering industrial electronics to hopscotching techno inversions—plastering the whole track in unsettling electro ephemera as they narrate with a gasping vocal about, in part, a conversation with God. Somehow it all congeals into something propulsive and energetic. It isn’t pop perfection, as they once imagined, but it demonstrates what Macula Dog do best: They turn trash into treasure.
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