Jerry Paper - Carousel (2015)

Jerry Paper is the sonic caricature of New York-based musician Lucas Nathan. Brought into the world after Nathan's previous, more abstract projects dissolved into the ether, Jerry Paper represents a cartoonish vision of Self materialized through Jerry's bizarre vision of pop music. Nathan's latest full-length under the Jerry Paper moniker, Carousel, combines his fascination with synthetic reproductions of "real" instruments with his own brand of philosophical meditations. The album furthers the effort to make "goofy" sounds into "serious" music through the juxtaposition of idiosyncratic lyrics, sounds, and structures within the "grammar" of pop music. That being said, the album is much more than the sum of it's parts. Like his other releases, Carousel is meant to be taken not so much song-by-song but as a complete piece. Weaving through themes of greed, corruption, waste, impermanence, and belief, the listener is presented with a world of piggies, cockroaches, and garbage people set to a soundtrack of quasi-orchestral synth madness, a kind of saccharine sheen that you're not sure is cleanliness or grease; all you can be sure of is that you're riding out Jerry's trip.