Well, it’s come to the time again where I have to write about an artist for the last time in this series. So long, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, I hardly knew ye. The tale of how I came about the band can be found in my post for ‘Like Acid Rain’, posted almost three years ago to this day. Three years, you know. It really goes by like that. I can’t say that I’m the hugest fan of UMO’s work overall. I actually made a bit of a point to myself to listen to their most recent record. I still haven’t and it’s been out for quite some time now. So, yeah. As I say, not the biggest fan. Or at least not the most committed of their listeners. But I do like ‘The Garden’ though. That’s a really nice song.

Out of the, I think, four UMO albums I’ve heard in full, I reckon Multi-Love is head-and-shoulders above the rest. And the album comes to a close with today’s featured track, ‘Puzzles’, a commentary about America’s racial issues and visa policies that sort of comes out of the blue. Up to that point, the album deals with frontman Ruban Nielson’s feelings on fame, various anxieties and love, all framed within the context of an polyamorous relationship he was indulging with two women. However, once you learn that the track is based on the experience of he and his wife having to leave the States because their tourist visas expired, it does make a lot more sense. The track does take a while to get going, starting with an ambient intro of a synthesizer repeating two chords amid the sound of what I think is something throwing stuff into a dumpster. Guitars don’t enter the frame until 56 seconds in, acoustic (bear in mind), playing the chord progression of the verses in a calming, slower manner before two strikes of an open hi-hat mark the entrance of the electric guitars, one of which sounds like it’s being strangled each time a chord rings from the fretboard.

Even from that first time I heard this track in 2017, I got the feeling that it was written to act as this sort of epic closer. It’s asking the “big” questions pertaining to America’s racial issues, which is all well and good. I mean, it’s not wrong to want to write about that sort of stuff. But it doesn’t go too deep into it, as the first verse is the same as the second and the choruses are repeated twice too. In fact, the singing part within this track probably take up the minority of its duration, as it’s bookended by the long intro and the two-and-a-half minute outro, which also fades out too. Sort of ends the album on this wandering note rather than a huge climactic finish, which I sometimes feel a bit let down by. But that feeling only really comes having listened to the album as a whole. Otherwise, I’m singing along to all of those guitar lines and notes that make up those instrumental passages, or moving my head to that skipping ascending guitar melody in the choruses among those overblown drums. Though I might have my own tiny gripes with it, I wish I had more hands so I could give it four thumbs-up.