Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros: PersonA

Edward Sharpe has made his name by peddling a particular brand of fabricated hippie utopianism. He’s a charlatan, but he believes in the promise he’s selling and, perhaps more importantly, he sells it well: this solitary sing-along chorus can solve the world’s most complex sociological ills, he might say, trust me, just belt out this melody and lift your hands in unison. From 2009’s spirited yet transparently specious Up From Below to 2012’s rustic psych-rock conundrum Here to 2013’s retro-for-retro’s-sake eponymous LP, Sharpe and his cohort of itinerant multi-instrumentalists, The Magnetic Zeroes, have thrived on a revivalist flower-folk aesthetic centered around a faux messianic figure and the all-accepting, all-loving future he preaches.

In a sense, he wants you to believe that his tracks aren’t bits of sonic data waiting to be streamed, but pre-extant gypsy campfire songs performed — one by one, flame after flame — by a peripatetic cult-ensemble traveling by motorcade. He dreams up a road for you to follow him down; this motorcade stops every night, its original destination forgotten, and a match is tossed to timber as the band tunes their instruments. By flickering light, these players play their hearts out until their visions die off and their fingers bleed.

The first words of PersonA instantiate this setting with deliberate economy: “Hot coals / Laying on my motorcade”, Sharpe sings, a maudlin guitar figure circling him, each syllable a trembling wisp of smoke emanating from the coals he imagines, and the album’s mood materializes as these wisps float off into the track’s negative space. Indeed, PersonA is maudlin and cold and conflicted to the bone, the high-contrast shadow vista creeping out from behind Up from Below‘s brimming effulgence. Here, there’s not a bright future, but a dystopia in which utopianism seems vital.

It’s a mood that, to Sharpe’s credit, complicates the mystic-troubadour caravan image that the band has relied on thus far. Each composition could be construed, not as a participatory twilight jam, but as an isolated wandering-away into the strange, proto-apocalyptic landscapes the Zeros’ motorcade stops in. Sharpe leaves his compatriots behind to explore labyrinths of colorless trees and stretches of snow-sheeted prairie, the campfire becoming a lone spark in the distance, the cars, likewise, just specks of some vague substance evaporating into air.

This is a Magnetic Zeros album, definitively, but their usual roots-folk optimism has been imbued with a darker hue. “Wake Up The Sun”, for example, finds Sharpe critiquing institutionalized religion over a flitting crypto-jazz piano that comes and goes like a hallucination leading the singer through twisting forest paths.

The following track, “Free Stuff”, also strands Sharpe alone with his thoughts. In it, he seems to lean against a tree etched with forgotten names and, eyes peering through its branches, he strums out a Beatlesque folk-jaunt over a stomp-clap backbeat. The long, denuded note he hits in the chorus is a rare feat of genuine mysticism; it aches and flows with a wrenching sense of abandonment that, once articulated, impresses itself on you as well. These are tracks where a kind of seeker’s restlessness — of drifting off in order to find some passing truth — comes emphatically to the fore.

But this restlessness appears perhaps most prominently in the album’s third track, “Somewhere”, a fingerpicked, transported-by-love acoustic ballad that resembles a melodic amalgam of McCartney’s “Two of Us” and Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun”. On the surface, the track’s lyric exudes a summery romantic blissfulness, but Sharpe’s vocal — a crackling, singsong ember-warble — suggests a more complicated story. “Somewhere alone I found her wandering / Lonely and wandering / So lovely and wandering / Now we’ve come together and we’re wandering home”, he sings, the word “wandering” repeated over and over again until the verb itself seems adrift, causing the listener to doubt whether or not Sharpe and his lover know how to get to this “Somewhere” they’re wandering to or even what it is.

Their “home”, likely the same “Home” that the Zeros’ so memorably pined for on Up From Below, is the same mutable non-place from the track’s forebear “Two of Us”, but now the “nowhere” that McCartney envisioned — “Two of us riding nowhere” — has become a looming abstraction: Sharpe takes his lover by the hand and leads her away from the motorcade, out into the cold and unfamiliar emptiness, promising her that they will soon return home — somewhere? nowhere? — without revealing any more detail about their route or destination. Does he even know? Or will they simply wander interminably?

“No Love Like Yours”, so far the album’s most commercially successful track, also contains a blissed-out lyric that obscures a deeper conceptual ambiguity. “Don’t know the dictionaire / Don’t know what clothes to wear / I’m just in love with you”, Sharpe sings over a barroom piano bustle. But while his affections are emphasized ad nauseum, it remains unclear whether they are reciprocated. This leaves the singer in a precarious epistemic situation; he’s literally stupefied by the extremity of his infatuation, unable to remember his name let alone put together a coherent sentence. The only knowledge he retains is the bare fact of his love and his love alone.

Put another way, Sharpe is embodying the romantic protagonist from Sam Cooke’s 1960 classic “(What a) Wonderful World”, but now the conditional clause of the lyric, the “if” from “And I know that if you love me, too / What a wonderful world this would be”, has assumed an added gravity: the Cooke-Sharpe figure is losing his ability to learn, to remember, to comprehend, and this utopia he seeks, this “Wonderful World”, is starting to fade from possibility as his passion consumes him. Indeed, this is the central deceit running through both lyrics — namely, that there’s nothing but a dystopia of dumbstruck wanderers and confounded fools until the singer’s love is returned.

However, the appeal of PersonA is that Sharpe doesn’t resist this dystopian ethos. In “Let it Down”, he urges his followers to accept the cold and misfortune that has afflicted their motorcade, to surrender to the divine forces that be. Just after the three-minute mark, he seems to acquiesce to these forces himself and, in turn, to break into a spasm of garbled incantations. It’s arguably the album’s best moment: he yelps out a sequence of non-signifying trisyllabic sounds, impelling those gathered around him to accept nature’s dictates and destroy the motorcade. “Torch-the-cars, torch-the-cars, on-bare-feet, on-bare-feet”, he seems to yell, but, naturally, some skepticism arises: should we follow this man any longer? Or is it time to actually wander home?