There are issues here, with a man who appears to outsource so much responsibility for his own mental health. Mostly, though, Circles maintains its inward-looking holding pattern – sometimes to the point of mild irritation. “I move carelessly, that’s why I’m always trippin’/I guess it’s like electrolytes, you help me go the distance,” Miller rhymes on Hand Me Downs, a key track, about craving family. “You throw me off my high horse, probably fall to my death.” There are more zingers too. “I spent my life living with a lot of regrets,” Miller drawls wryly on Hands, another strong track. Occasionally, a more playful 26-year-old surfaces. Paak the languid anomie, however, is all Miller’s. Complicated’s synth-funk suggests the Internet, or former collaborator Anderson. Anyone expecting an end-to-end downer will thrill at many of the funkier interludes on Circles. Watch the video for Good News by Mac Miller. “There’s a whole lot more for me waitin’ on the other side,” Miller sings, “I’m always wonderin’ if it feel like summer.” Good News, released earlier this month, set the tone. They reflect on Miller’s wavering mental state some even hint at untimely death, suggestions that have littered his work previously. The barbershop intro paves the way for a looser hip-hop track, one with a spectacular bit of production: a Doppler-effect stutter ends up functioning as ersatz backing vocals.Īlthough Miller’s death was not suicide – three men have been charged with supplying adulterated drugs – many of the songs on Circles continue the bleak reckonings voiced on Swimming. At the other end of the musical spectrum, the excellent Blue World interpolates a section of the Four Freshmen’s It’s a Blue World (incidentally, a formative influence for Brian Wilson’s exploration of harmonies). Surprisingly, on Everybody, Miller covers Arthur Lee’s Everybody’s Gotta Live, an existential ballad from 1972 sung here as bluesman mumblecore, an approach Miller echoes on the title track. The musical mood is light, but the lyrics weigh heavy, going around in – well – circles: “That’s on me, I know, that’s on me, it’s all my fault.” Other tracks transmit Miller’s love for the solo John Lennon.
That’s on Me is in waltz-time, a miniature of baroque Laurel Canyon pop. Strangest of all is how much significant chunks sound like Beck on his most recent, very sad, album Hyperspace, or 2002’s Sea Change. If Swimming felt contemplative, Circles feels even more like a singer-songwriter album than a hip-hop joint – a tendency most likely amplified by Brion’s treatments. Miller and Brion play almost everything else. Significant personnel include Wendy Melvoin from Prince’s Revolution on guitar or bass on a couple of tracks. The themes – of moving in water, and futility – are intact by contrast, Circles lacks the busy guest list that set Swimming apart.
Swimming and Circles were intended as a two-part project: “swimming in circles”. The songs reflect on Miller’s wavering mental state some even hint at untimely death
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Having worked widely across genres and film, from Kanye West’s lane-swerving 2005 album Late Registration to 2017’s soundtrack for Lady Bird, Brion also co-produced significant chunks of Swimming. Necessarily it remains a work-in-progress, a companion album to Swimming licked into releasability by producer/composer Jon Brion with the blessing of Miller’s family. By this point, he counted the cream of the Los Angeles jazz and funk underground – Thundercat, Flying Lotus – as collaborators and friends, and was accepted as a fellow talent by some of the most verbally dexterous rappers in the game.Ĭircles is a desperately sad coda to this lotus-like blossoming. On Swimming, the album he released in the wake of their breakup, shortly before his death, Miller – a multi-instrumentalist – wrote a horn part on a track called Ladders, and contemplated his own fissile brain chemistry with hard-won perspective.
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