Oh dear. This is becoming somewhat of a trend. A few weeks ago, I reviewed Steven Seagal’s enigmatic — and ultimately problematic — album “Songs From the Crystal Cave”. This week, I’m back with another take on a little-known celebrity vanity project: Michael Cera’s 2014 avant-garde/lo-fi/indie-folk/ragtime compilation-album-thing entitled “True That”.
Cera’s music, like himself, is endearingly awkward and lovably nerdy. The 21-track collection seems infinite in both its length and its stylistic influences. From the synth-driven lo-fi charm of “2048” to the heartfelt folk sensibility of “Clay Pigeons” (originally by Blaze Foley), there are far too many genres captured here to detail each of them in this writing, an abundance that works for and against “True That” as a cohesive musical work. At first listen, it does seem a bit like a hodgepodge of Cera's past musical exploits, and, if you dig deeper into its origins, you’ll discover that that’s exactly what it is. In an interview with Stereogum, Cera admitted that he had been working on a series of Garageband recordings for years before quietly releasing them when a friend told him that he was being too careful with his music. Whether this makes “True That” more or less compelling is up to the audience, but it certainly adds an air of intimacy to its listening experience. No matter what track you put on, you get the sense that it was recorded high up in some stuffy apartment building, with Michael Cera toiling away dissonant folk tunes on his collection of acoustic instruments. It’s this DIY nature that makes “True That” so perfect. Here, we see Cera’s brain in its truest, most authentic form. It should also be noted that no other instrumentalist is featured on the album; Cera wrote, recorded, and produced it all by himself with the equipment he had in his bedroom.
It’s almost impossible to come up with highlights and lowlights of this album. Some of the shorter tracks are clearly intended to be instrumental interludes to longer pieces, and beyond that, because of the multi-faceted, experimental nature of “True That”, its merits and demerits stretch beyond the binary of good and bad. One thing is clear, though. Michael Cera’s debut album encapsulates its creator perfectly through its charm, its playfulness, and its downright weirdness.
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