A subtle, somewhat somber piano is waiting to commiserate with us in melodic terms in the song “Peace Piece – Revisited,” the opening cut from Monsieur Job’s W.T.F.!, but as we’ll learn in the next five slow jams on this 120-song LP (yes, you read that correctly), facilitating emotionality through singular dimensions is hardly the first order of business this Colombian outfit has in mind here. In songs like “Capri,” “Dashat,” and “Eme Jota,” Monsieur Job accentuate sensuous beats with a lot of synthetic, jazzy melodicism, but I don’t know that it’s until we’re a little deeper into the tracklist that we can appreciate the importance of this accentuation as it relates to other elements – like the lyricism in “Chukiti,” or the inventive sonic swell in “Tu Boquita.”
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Tito Murillo is among the many collaborators to join Monsieur Job for this album, and his feature in “Quiero Darte la Mano – Remix” alone had me swinging my hips without much resistance at all. A lot of the remixes here, like those for “Spinner,” “Fuck,” “No Pain,” “Mighty High,” and “I Get High,” are a little more anxious in presentation than the standard mixes of the same songs are, but each also offers us a different perspective on an instrumental narrative otherwise too blunt to be broken down with any success. In short, there are no casual listening sessions with W.T.F.! – only deep, intellectual experiences that start and end with a harmony much like the one in “Boogie Bailalo Brincao – Remix.”
The romanticism of “What Do You Want from Me” and the certified hit “Chukiti – Remix” appealed to me the first time I heard them as much as they did listening back to them just the other day, and I think the overall shelf life of W.T.F.! is likely to be greater than its contemporaries for one big reason – it’s too long to tire of. It’s the length of a typical workday for most people, and if you spend any length of time shuffling through the tracklist, I believe you’ll find the mazelike collection of material to be even more provocative after repeat listens. “Spinner,” “Rapsodia – Remix,” and “Malevo Maleva” don’t play the same the second time through that they do the first; there’s a deeper continuity they offer after listening to W.T.F.! in its entirety, no matter how long that might take the audience.
I’ve been following Monsieur Job for the last three years, and while I couldn’t have predicted a release as major as this LP coming so soon in the project’s existence, it doesn’t really shock me that Toby Holguin has been able to accomplish something as lofty as this is as soon as he has. W.T.F.! throws every color into a pot without letting any of them run together in a hazy, unfocused manner, and when considering the complicated nature of its content beside that of the other elite experimental releases of 2021, I believe most critics will deem it one of the best records of its kind to debut the year.
Claire Uebelacker