We Are the World

Now this is music I can masturbate to! As danceable as it is disturbing, Clay Stones squirms me right from the get-go: “Foot Follows Foot” and “Clay Stones” are coming-of-age ritual music for the last pagan rave. Addictive as fuck, haunting as hell, Clay Stones’ beats compel helpless skeletons to shake and hearts to pump faster with lyrical myth-making. Like a gothic En Vogue, singer Megan Gold stretches and bends guttural glissandos and breathy chants across glassy hooks so hot I’d follow their directions straight to the sacrificing stone. Robbie Williamson pulls sonic bits from synths and voices and maybe even ghosts, creating percussive mysteries that drive Gold’s legends through your body and deep into your genetic memory. Less a band than an interdisciplinary cult led by choreographer Ryan Heffington and dancer Nina McNeely, We Are the World dances and sings and tickles the No-Touch Zones of this generation’s interest in darkness, disguised by costumes seemingly yanked from Julie Taymor’s interpretation of Shogun. As an album of music, then, Clay Stones only represents one facet of the WATW project, yet still captivates: its soundscape is textually intelligent yet primally accessible, and catchy as the Plague. And in the music video for “Clay Stones” (co-directed by the group and Alma Har’el) included with the CD, We Are the World ensures its visual aesthetic is expressed via wall humping, water worship, group self-gratification, and other forms of timeless merry-making. We Are the World performs the demons they discuss in “Goya’s Monsters,” a song that quotes Duchamp by saying, “There’s nothing here.” I’ll bet Duchamp would have loved to participate in the spectacle of We Are the World.