“Paradise Now” is Obongjayar’s Journey to Catharsis

Much of the pleasure of listening to an Obongjayar project comes from watching the artist slowly unravel like a soap opera’s protagonist. On stage, he’s a frenzied animal, a shaman under the thrall of ancestral spirits, singing and dancing with wild energy. Somehow, his recorded music manages to pack that same urgency, that primal energy that stalks his stage performances, while also regaling fans with riveting narrative arcs that rival some of the best movies. 

Pain and trauma haunt his music. He’s constantly in motion; either running away from pain towards pleasure, or charging head-first like a crazed bull into the depths of his despair, apparently searching for reprieve, or perhaps for answers, in the heart of the carnage. One of the most striking features of his canon is how its quests for central redeeming truths, its journeys towards some revelatory catharsis, are mostly performative. The truth is  evident to all from the start, both the artist and his audience know how it all ends. And so, the journey, through the tracks on the projects, feels like a stilted choreography that better helps the artist countenance his reality. We all have rituals and patterns that we unwittingly create, that help us navigate the vagaries of the world. Music, particularly the process of creating a project, is how Obonjayer untangles his trauma, how he conjures order in a world at the precipice of disaster.

We see this phenomenon in Sweetness, his collaborative EP with Sarz, which is how most of us first came to know his gorgeously energetic music. Here we see Obongjayar, the inveterate lover, negotiating romance with a dithering love interest. In Sweetness, the opening track, against the backdrop of a deceptively cheery beat, he offers paean after paean to his muse. But his jaunty affect is tinctured with worry. Even as he slathers her in praises, his voice betrays his fears about her investment in the relationship. He sings with bracing wistfulness: “Don’t give me the runaround.” By the next track, Gone Girl, the faint glimmers of worry transform into a roving, inscrutable monster. “Is there something, is there something I’m not doing?/ Are we good, have I misread the room?/ Have we changed and split into two? Do we even know each other?/ Do we even know each other anymore?”

He’s flustered, confused, walloped by his lover’s sudden coldness. Except it wasn’t sudden, he had seen the early warning signs but he wasn’t ready to grapple with the reality of his drifting lover, and so he continued in a delusion, choosing instead to try to hold together a fraying relationship with effusive praise. It’s a situation we can all relate to, the feeling of disbelief, the second-guessing, that intensifies as your lover increasingly becomes distant. “Is there something I’m not doing?” is perhaps the universal refrain for this situation.

Paradise Now, Obongjayar’s latest album is similarly haunted by trauma, heartbreak, and initial inertia to come to grasp a fraught situation. The songs on the project are steeped in a presentment of loss and sharpened and bolstered by it. Here, pain and pleasure are not opposites but the same. In Paradise Now, the artist’s predilection  for plumbing the depths of his distress with music takes on heightened awareness. The songs here are lean and muscular, shorn of excess, and suffused with an urgency that makes for a visceral listen. Reflecting the mordant themes of the project, the songs exist in a solemn, almost depressing soundscape, lending a certain forcefulness to his line of inquiry. 

Unlike in Sweetness, the opening track of his titular EP, where he starts with a delusion and slowly descends to reality; in It’s Time, the opening track of Paradise Now, he’s circumspect, fully lucid about the futility of trying to salvage the situation. Having, in the first verse, engaged in a bit of schlepping around emotional baggage, in the chorus he declares “I think it’s time I pick up the pieces.” The second verse is however more biting, more graphic. “We haven’t spoken in years,” he sings, “And I still carry arrows in my flesh/ From the last time that we did/ You made me feel so small and of no consequence.” This particular sequence of words is so potent in its descriptive power, evoking the suffocating sense of despair that threads through Dylan Thomas’ late poems.

By the second track, however, his resolve to move on, to pick up the pieces, comes crashing down, giving way to an almost pathetic wistfulness. “Why did you leave? You weren’t here/ Staring down the barrel of the gun/ Another year like a bullet, shot me in the face.” In the chorus of Peace In Your Heart, over  winsome melodies and lush guitar riffs, he sings “You’re killing an innocent man, I wish you peace in your heart.” In the first verse, he conjures yet another graphic scene: “There′s blood in your hands, a knife in my neck/ From things that you said to me/ Don’t just stand there and watch me bleed/ Trust never lived here, your walls never came down/ Stop punishing me for what he did.” Of course, he wishes her anything but peace.

What follows is striking. He continues to unravel, sinking deeper into an abyss until we get to Not in Surrender, which is situated in the second half of the project. Over a glittering 80s Funk beat he announces “I put my hands up, not in surrender/ I’m getting ready to fly, uh/ I’m superhuman/ I’m supernova/ I burn the candle on both sides.” From here on, the tide shifts and he begins a precipitous journey towards cathartic release. In Instant Animal, buoyed by a rapidly mutating Rock beat, he declares his ascendancy by way of hypnotic trills and guttural sounds. 

In Born In This Body, he’s at the height of his powers, carefully interrogating themes of body positivity and self-acceptance with the acuity of a sage. “You’re always tryna prove something/ Who is it all for?/ If not for you, what are you doing?/ You’re covered in paint/ Your clothes and your shoes don’t fit/ Don’t make yourself small,” he sings to us, and apparently also to himself. By the time we reach Happy Head, he attains catharsis, the peace contained within the song is boundless, and forceful. Listening to the song, you can feel a calm descend on you and swaddle you in its warmth. He leaves us with a poignant charge: “Slow down, you’re burning out, stop for the lights, to make your head happy.”