The New Yorker:

The artist’s latest album, “The Passionate Ones,” catches your weariness, and, with a dreamer’s irrationality, asks if you would consider transforming it, even for a while.

By Doreen St. Félix

Marcus Brown’s voice is a crooner’s voice, a baritone, emanating notes from some spot in his body deeper than his chest. Biologically speaking, this is impossible. But taking in his vocal, its dark timbre and real dimensionality, one feels perplexed and forced to come up with an explanation. Occasionally, Brown, who makes mesmerizing, lovelorn music under the name Nourished by Time, is a serenader reaching for the style of Jodeci or SWV—sinewy, solicitous, but alien underneath the ad-libbing. He can be scarily operatic, showing flashes of Meat Loaf. He can be witty and deadpan, like Nate Dogg, or a croaker, like Keith Sweat if he had a feel for play, say, doing purposeful and provocative nasal singing. I haven’t yet had the chance to watch Nourished by Time perform live onstage, but I am eager to see how he makes and inhabits a temporary world, given how much theatre and performance are already embedded in his singing.

Nourished by Time, who is thirty-one, has just come out with his second full-length album, called “The Passionate Ones,” a fitting title for a romantic who is working out, with each output, how he might survive the culture of soul-killing cynicism he was born into. All around him, there is misery and hoarded wealth, work and little love. Not everyone wants to—or can—assimilate spiritually. A preoccupation of Brown, who calls himself a songwright, and who identifies as a leftist, is the twinned sufferings of the worker and the lover, both desperate for refuge, or, perhaps, more bleakly, for a release from the systems in which they cannot succeed. “Max Potential,” a song on the new record, exploits self-improvement gospel to explore this maladjustment. An echoing, disembodied voice asks, as a synth drifts in, “You’re on earth to maximize your potential, know what I’m sayin’?” Later, Nourished by Time makes a proclamation, supported by a grungy guitar: “If I’m going to go insane, at least I’m loved by you.” The title of the album is a reference to Prince’s “The Beautiful Ones”—a song that some have interpreted as a veiled plea to Vanity, Prince’s muse. Nourished by Time, though, is channelling a loftier, spiritual reading—the passionate ones are a tribe, the artists perforce.

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