Best New Tracks - Pitchfork: tUnE-yArDs: "Wait for a Minute"

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tUnE-yArDs: "Wait for a Minute" Posted: 08 Apr 2014 02:26 PM PDT   By now, most people with even a couple bars' familiarity with tUnE-yArDs knows that Merrill Garbus's schtick is twisting and playing her voice like an endlessly versatile instrument: synthesizer, siren, and stock-sound database in one. What separates this from shtick or a capella-troupe novelty is how she imbues her skill with a range of emotions, distilling them to their purest, most precisely expressed feelings. A tUnE-yArDs song doesn't sound so much joyful as it does like sudden, hard-fought ripples of joy, from gut to sound with no delay time; it's the kind of anger that seizes up the throat so the only words that can break out have to be sharp. "Wait for a Minute," the follow-up to proper Nikki Nack single "Water Fountain", is a deep album cut of the best kind: it doesn't have to be immediate, so instead it gets to be sneaky. Produced by Malay (who worked with Frank Ocean on Channel Orange), the track itself is a smooth, immediately likeable bit of late-afternoon R&B: little boom-bap percussion, synths as wispy as smoke curls. The only hint that it's a Garbus track, one where you'd more likely find knottier polyrhythms, is a cartoonish woodblock tick-tock that shows up periodically in the mix, nagging at the intro to stop grooving and hurry up, prodding at Garbus as she emotes on the bridge. It's an apt rendition of the malaise, somewhere between depression and writer's block, that Garbus describes, but true to form, her vocals do as much of the work. She sings the starkest lines, like "The mirror always disappoints/ I pinch my skin back till I see the joints,"  like jokes maybe she'll find funny one day, or almost absent-mindedly, each thought trailing off before it's got the chance to sink in. Like Garbus' best work, it's dense, more than a little disturbing, and easy to get lost in before you find that out.