Market

The reliably inventive songwriting project Market is a vessel for producer Nate Mendelsohn’s obsessive questions and answers, recollections of conversation and interior monologues. Well I Asked You A Question, his 2nd release for Western Vinyl, brims with a humorous, neurotic candor only outmatched by a wide and colorful sonic palette.

Since his last album Mendelsohn has become more entrenched in his Brooklyn music community, producing albums for Frankie Cosmos and Dougie Poole, performing in Vagabon and Sam Evian, and recording with Yaeji and Lady Lamb. These experiences worked their way into his songwriting, yielding an album that’ll likely appeal if you’re fond of records named Pet Sounds, Fantasma, Insignificance, Blonde, or XO. Sampled orchestras duel with real ones, a robot’s spoken word duets with a choir of humans, and blasts of noise “solo” over traditional rock instrumentation. Even more subversive is the lyrical perspective Mendelsohn has honed, synthesizing fragments of family neuroses, ebbs and flows of mental health, a world of daily minutiae, self-mythologizing through art, and infinite threads of idle conversation into a meaningful whole.

The core Market band is Stephen Becker, Natasha Bergman, and Duncan Standish. Further contributions came from Katie von Schleicher, Mike Haldeman (Moses Sumney, Alto Palo), Justin Felton (L’Rain, Strugglin’), Rose Droll (Feist, Art Feynman) and Helen Newby with engineering by Adam Hirsch (Sam Amidon, Stephen Steinbrink).