People (Bonus Track Version)

On 2007’s Lucas, Matt Mehlan followed the troubling thread that links creativity with mental illness, while 2008’s Money addressed anxieties surrounding our relationships with currency, the proverbial root of all evil. In other hands such material might seem overly grandiose, but Mehlan displays a disarmingly quixotic sincerity in the face of these big ideas; his conceptual ambitions seem like the products of genuine soul-searching rather than intellectual hubris. On People, Mehlan is as ambitious as ever, questioning his own faith in humanity and declaring “I think I still believe in people” even as he presents the listener with a grisly catalogue of human follies. Musically, People is surprisingly lean, boasting a set of tight, often piano-centered arrangements that act as a kind of counterweight to the album’s conceptual sprawl. The most dramatic example of this minimal aesthetic is “More Than the One Thing,” a striking bit of avant-pop that weds a shifting piano arpeggio to a typically dense Mehlan narrative about New York life to stunning effect.