Four years ago, when Pitchfork was still a relevant medium for independent and experimental music, Ought appeared under the Best New Music section and was labelled as art-punk from Constellation records. Constellation Records is a Canadian label famous for post-rock, and their biggest artist is cult band Gy!BE, so this all had nothing to do with polished quartet from Montreal.
If we were to trust Pitchfork, their debut More Than Any Other Daywas worth 8.6/10, and the material wowed the younger generations. Punkers were quoting David Foster Wallace with gradual departure from the standard rhythm to the point where it all seemed like it will come out of the record, just so that it could all come together moments later.
Then it came even more experimental EP Once More With Feeling. Reviews were not unified, and genre pundits claimed there are too many similarities with Television. A year later, Sun Coming Down was released with mostly positive reviews. Freshmen and sophomore are behind us, and now Ought are running towards a degree in art punk.
Instead of chaos, Room Inside The World offers a robust rhythm structure. Songs such as These 3 Things strongly resemble shadowplay days of the 80s. No more recitations with accidental drum kicking. Frontman Tim Darcy now sounds like King Krule. It's as If someone has taken their debut and tied it up so that it could come out as coherent and cohesive. Something like that would usually be convinient, but not in the case of Ought. Their music style was based on those messy sections supported by outbursts of recitations and changes in tempo.
There are still traces of the old style, for example in a track titled Desire, but it's still all "ameliorated" with structure. Shiny moments of the album, Disgraced in America and Brief Shield, are the only tracks that offer what we expect from Ought. Slow and fragmented. Undetermined. The rest of the record relies on the atmosphere nurtured by Preoccupations.
Room Inside The World is like caffeine, but third day in a row. The effect is still there, but it doesn't wake you up with the same "boom" as on the first day.
