“A daring turn in a different direction” (NPR Music) for Amen Dunes, Death Jokesmarks his first record since 2018’s Freedom (named a “best album of the decade” by Pitchfork). Death Jokes is a major departure, an ambitious electronic album that sees McMahon immersing himself in the electronic music he’d grown up with at raves and clubs but never imagined himself able to make. For the first time since the project’s incarnation in 2006, the spiritual reflections and meditations of Amen Dunes are turned away from himself and out sharply towards the world. Through samples and lyrics, the album plays like a scathing electronic essay on America’s culture of violence, dominance, and destructive individualism.
“Round the World” began to take shape with McMahon recording a voice memo in winter 2019 as he sang along to an improvised piano arrangement. The vocal came almost in full and was based around nine minutes of a constantly changing piano arrangement which took weeks to notate. McMahon couldn’t easily perform the piano part and tried to hire two different pianists to record it, but they weren’t able or willing. What first sounds like a heartbreak ballad — “Made up my mind/ I give up on you” — later warps into a ghostly dirge — “This world’s on fire/ Nothing seems true.” The haunted refrains of “round the world, round the world” and “let it rattle, let it rattle” sounded prophetic a few months later, when the pandemic took over around the world. The rest of the song features numerous samples, including a collection of Chilean protest recordings from the coup in 1973, a mash-up of Coil with Bill Monroe, Fairlight CMI string and horn, a slowed-down UK Garage track, and others. Country and folk music subtly appear throughout Death Jokes, and this song’s melody comes almost directly, and unconsciously, from the traditional song “There’s a Hole in the Bucket.”
