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DUM1 — On a Dime (Take a Turn)

DUM1’s tunes ramble loosely, all strum and jangle and sunny nonchalance, with the diffuse, slightly stoned charm of a Paul Westerberg tune. “Gilbey’s Landing” is, maybe, the most Mats like of these cuts (or maybe it’s “No1’s Good”), with its woozy chorus and and prismatic splinters of guitar sound, though the single “Mercury Sabre” has the amplified rock band lyricism of Teenage Fanclub,

DUM1 orbits the same Bay Area garage rock scene as Dusted favorite Ray Seraphin and like him delivers jagged tunes with whispery choruses, rough-shod rock energy tamped down to a tender murmur. Both artists practice The Jesus & Mary Chain trick of wrapping hoarse voiced melody in feedback-y guitars. This particular project is a solo outing for Mack Narragan of the fuzz-pop outfit CVCC. Or at least it started out that way, with Narragan using the music to help him process loss and grief. From bedroom recording beginnings the band has expanded to include Gracie Malley of The Greasy Gills and Rip Room, Sam Benedetti of The Greasy Gills and Julio Palacios of CVCC.

The music, then, balances a private, personal, even melancholic side with the raucous, good time energies of power pop. Like all the best pop songs, its tunes hover between happy and sad, sweetness and friction. “I know it won’t mend,” Narragan sings, repeatedly and with an air of resignation, but the drums thump, the guitars sway and the music lifts upward. The song refuses to be boxed in by one mood or another. 

A couple of songs stand out from the rest. “Plastic Covers” frames muttering poetry with luminous guitar work, pitched somewhere between R.E.M. and Ultimate Painting, and you can see why the band would want to lead with it as a single. But really, the best cut on the whole disc is lovely, languid “From Here to Sebastia.” Splayed guitar chords linger, the drum beat pushes forward and the melody blows up in little crescendoes of longing. Fanciful lyrics convert fairytale images, but the chorus is anchored in real human ache, “From here to Sebastia…from here to you.” 

Jennifer Kelly

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Columbia Icefield — A Silence Opens (Out Of Your Head)

A Silence Opens — and then what? Columbia Icefield’s third album inhabits the ensuing chasm. One death kicked the band in, and a second claimed one of its members around the time they should all have been crawling out. What has ensued is a profound reckoning with the immutability of loss and the persistence of love.

The first to pass was trumpeter Ron Miles, who was taken too young by a blood disease. Miles was one of those folks who left a mark not only musically, but in human terms. For Nate Wooley, Columbia Icefield’s leader and trumpeter, he was an early musical influence, then a mentor and afterwards an enduring friend. After spending some time acclimating himself to the unacceptable fact of Miles’ death, Wooley picked four tunes that he played or loved and brought them to CIF. It was not an obvious fit; Miles’ music was typically more lyrical than Wooley’s. And Columbia Icefield was a band with a very distinct sound, albeit a mutable one. The quartet originally comprised Wooley, drummer Ryan Sawyer, pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn, and electric guitarist Mary Halvorson; cloudy, viscous, and complex, the group’s sound easily evoked the smallness of humanity in the face of nature that had been the original inspiration for the group. Between the completion of the CIF’s second album and the recording of this one, Halvorson yielded the spot in front of the guitar amp to Ava Mendoza, who dispelled the music’s vaporousness gave it a harder, blunter edge.

The group’s treatment of Miles’ music thrives on the tension between lyrical structures and aggressive attacks. Wooley’s solo introduction to “Howard Beach” exudes a grace that the trumpeter rarely evidences as it traverses sorrow and guarded joy. As the rest of the band joins him, Alcorn’s low swells add an undercurrent of uncertainty, which the ensemble then detonates with a Mendoza-led exercise in full frontal rock action. Passages of barely-there percussion and downward-cascading ensemble statements abstract “Darken My Door,” which opens the way for Alcorn to deliver an even more unsettling extended solo. Alcorn reverses that progression on “Wildwood Flower,” only gradually arriving at a melody that is alternately blown gently and blown to bits by Wooley and Mendoza. Mendoza’s grinding, blues-rock riffing of “You Taste” launches marvelously unhinged solos by Alcorn and Wooley.

If the record had ended there, we’d be talking about the record as a deeply felt Viking funeral for Miles. But shortly after the session, Alcorn unexpectedly died. The recordings sat for months before the rest of the ensemble hatched a way to weave a response to her passing into them. Five sung, whistled, and choral arrangements of one of Alcorn’s favorite songs, Victor Jara’s “El Derecho de Vivi ren Paz,” bracket and buffer the Miles tunes. Their recurrence ensures that the tune will linger long after the record is over, much like Alcorn and Miles’ spirits do in the hearts of those who mourn them.

Bill Meyer

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Rodrigo Amado This Is Our Language Quartet — Wailers (European Echoes)

Photo by Vera-Marmelo

Yes indeed, they wail. Wailers is the fourth album by Portuguese saxophonist Rodrigo Amado’s This Is Our Language Quartet. Its title comes from a defiantly exultant Amiri Baraka poem, which is reproduced inside the digipak; it also aptly describes one thing that the assembled musicians do very well. Amado has several ensembles that contain august personages, but none of them project quite the same affective intensity as this one.

Jazz sages will note the quartet’s name and recognize it as an homage to one of Ornette Coleman’s LPs for Atlantic, which collectively are the hallowed ground zero of free jazz. But if you look at the musicians involved, another name comes to mind. Bassist Kent Kessler, drummer Chris Corsano, and tenor saxophonist Joe McPhee may have all been born in different decades (1950s, 1970s, and 1930s respectively) all hail from the USA, and this is Amado’s American band. Amado’s course points to one compass quadrant. His playing is gruff and deeply rooted in a jazz lineage that stretches from pre-bop to free music from either side of the Atlantic, and while each of his combos is shaped by the personalities that make it up, they’re all devoted to making music that is completely spontaneous, unabashedly spontaneous and cohesive.

The This Is Our Language Quartet is down with that plan. Each player registers as a distinctly individual contributor. Corsano is explosively omnidirectional, letting loose short bursts of polyrhythmic energy. Kessler’s combination of velocity and low-end vibration stokes the engine. Their brief bow-meets-perambulatory percussion duet at the beginning of “Hot Folk” is a master class in the generation of poetic tension. McPhee sticks to just one of his many horns, but that’s all he needs to unpack and connect decades of history with a scholar’s acumen and a true believer’s fervor. Amado is right there with him, fluent and fiery, storming the barricades on the title track and melting hearts like chocolate molded into the shape of Duke Ellington’s horn section in the middle of “Hot Folk.”

Wailers, which was recorded late in 2019, is the second release on Amado’s own European Echoes imprint. It may well be the band’s last. While Corsano and Amado have kept up as a duo, neither Kessler nor McPhee are racking up as many road miles as they once did. If so, it’s a splendid farewell.

Bill Meyer

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Cataclysmic / Pray to Be Saved — Total Crasher Assault (Deathdove)

Crasher crust is sort of akin to deathgrind: there are very, very few casual listeners. You are committed to the music, or you are assuredly not. This new split LP, from Baltimore’s Cataclysmic and DC-based Pray to Be Saved, provides stark evidence for why that should be. Total Crasher Assault is truth in advertising — if the determinedly unprofesh nature of the proceedings here didn’t render the idea of “advertising” anathema. The music wants to do violence to your ears, a mission which, if successful, would make music a null set. (This reviewer hopes he gets some points for avoiding malaprop-driven puns about “mute points.”)

Cataclysmic’s side of the split is so full of buzz, hiss and distortion that you’ll need to turn the speakers (please, reader, don’t use earbuds for this stuff…) way, way up. And you will promptly be horrified that you did. Your reaction to that initial burst of discomfiture will likely seal the deal. If you are akin to this reviewer, you will grin and crank the volume higher in search of the songs that are surfing the cataract of noise. “Endless Disaster” is likely the most interesting of Cataclysmic’s four tracks, in that the percussion and bursts of barely discernable sounds (a voice here; a bass’s throb there; a sudden, entirely trackable guitar solo) suggest the most song-like experience available.

It may be the case that Pray to Be Saved’s side of the split is slightly more “listenable,” in conventional terms, and to be sure, there seems to be a theory of music production at work: drive everything so relentlessly into the red that the distortion creates a sequence of patterned waves. Check out “Victims,” perhaps the most delightfully fucked-with track on the whole LP. Alongside the band’s terrific demo from last year, the songs on this split constitute strong evidence that Pray to Be Saved is one of the best punk bands at work in the States.

Pray to Be Saved’s additional tracks cleave closer to crust’s signal conventions. The song structures of “Draft Day” and “Isolation” are more or less coherent, but the sonic mayhem remains chaotic. It frequently sounds like a jet is has flown through the middle of the proceedings, leaving shimmering, shuddering swells in its wake. Play this split loud enough and you may harness enough torque for takeoff.

Jonathan Shaw

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Niblock Hooker Soldier First — Paiva River Songs (Gold Bolus)

This album might be haunted by waters; it certainly makes no pretense not to be. Paiva River Songs has its beginnings with a hydrophone submerged in Portugal’s Rio Paiva. Composer Phil Niblock’s interests long focused on droning microtonal work, aided by digital processing, so it feels a little surprising to picture him lost in nature, making underwater field recordings (even though his most urban work could still have a natural sensibility to it). Then an odd thing happens: the music sounds almost electronic. Surely context matters here; streams babble and talk. They sound like other things, but usually not electronic textures. The placement of the sounds on a Niblock record create the hearing, in one sense, but also simply point us to a more focused listening of a common sound.

That’s where the other three members of this quartet come in (“quartet” used oddly here, as Niblock passed away in 2024, after the project was initiated but the year before the studio part of this album was recorded). Dave Soldier (violin, banjo) and David First (guitar, harmonica) had worked with Niblock before, but not with each other. They’d both worked with drummer William Hooker, and so the degree of separation any of these pairings had been, closed down to a unit that turns out to be a tight fit.

The group resolved to play only straightforward acoustic music to go with the field recordings, as if they were all sitting at a river, calling it “Free-Improv Americana.” The sounds they find cross a broad spectrum. At times both Soldier and First sound more focused on their sorts of experimental art music than on the “Americana” part of the project. At other times the album opens up into traditional music: spirituals, camp songs, and the like. There’s little here that you would actually sing around the campfire, but the three musicians feint at it enough to make classic melody more tangible than might be expected.

Mostly, the musicians bring out the oddity of the whole experience. It’s an exercise in something more accessible than deep listening, but when First introduces a jews harp into section 5, it’s an unlikely twist that makes us question where we are — certainly not in Niblock’s laptop. Soldier follows with a banjo, and it’s a transformative moment, a transport 150 years back in time, but one in which the free-flowing river sounds like the least natural part of the recording. It’s the inverse of something the group did earlier, when they moved from First’s harmonica into more abstracted violin work, generating a gap between the old-timey setting and the assertive contemporary sensibility.

The ebb and flow creates a friction between the natural and the constructed, both in terms of creation and reception, which keeps the enterprise compelling. At points, as in the eight-minute mark, the album sounds almost ghostly, but whether it’s the past haunting the present or present apparitions invading the past remains unclear. The album ends with one of its most dissonant sections, only hinting at a return to traditional songcraft before eventually returning to water. Or at least we can only think it’s water, as it sounds more digital than before, maybe because its surrounded by analog effects that have conditioned us to consider everything carefully.

Justin Cober-Lake

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Joseph Allred — The Old Gods (Carbon / Feeding Tube)

Spiritual seekers numbered among the founding fathers of the Takoma school of guitar playing. In addition to recording several albums of sacred and holiday music, one of which was the best-selling thing he ever did, John Fahey ended plenty of his records with a Christian hymn. He also dedicated one LP to a Hindu teacher, although he subsequently took it back, claiming that he was really just sweet on the guru’s secretary. Robbie Basho’s fantasias were infused with exoticism, mysticism and nature worship. Joseph Allred’s spent time with the music of both, and also pursued graduate level studies in theology and philosophy. When they invoke The Old Gods, they’re not being flip.

That seriousness of intent powers the four generously dimensioned instrumentals on this LP. Each is a solo performance that feels like a manifestation of a winding journey, played on a single instrument. The title track opens side A with some heraldic strums, each as radiant a mass of harmonics as can be tugged out of twelve guitar strings. Then the strumming blurs, initiating a cascade of sound whose turbulent surface is periodically broken by stern and sturdy melodies. The A side’s other piece, “Lonely Mount Koya,” is another twelve-string instrumental. It is named for a complex of Shingon Buddhist temples and graves, and it projects a Basho-like air of exaltation.

Flip the record over and you’re back in Tennessee. “Murmurations” is named for the complex maneuvers made by flocks of starlings, which sounds like just the sort of thing one might want to represent with a twelve-string guitar. Nope. Instead, Allred patiently plucks out patterns on a banjo, coaxing multiple voices out of the instrument’s relatively hurried string decay. They switch instruments once more on “Cumberland Yab-Yum,” to six-string guitar, whose starker output might be a metaphor for the title’s invocation of Tantric unity.

Allred’s notes on the album’s Bandcamp page frames the pursuit for old gods within boundaries of mind-blowing complexity and excessive simplicity. One is present to overwhelming reality and the other leads to comforting falsehoods. The dense swirl of these performances makes clear which side Allred trusts.

Bill Meyer

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Drifting in Silence — Where Waves Begin to Collide (Labile) 

Drifting in Silence constructs sonic abstractions from luminous synth tones, hiss, noise and organic instruments. Wavery washes of tone build and recede, a tremulous sense of becoming emerging from their long, gentle crescendos. The title of this 20th (or so) disc from the North Carolina ambient composer Derrick Stembridge suggests oceanic currents as a metaphor, and in fact, the music builds in a surf-like way, gathering strength then cresting, crashing, pulling back and reassembling in the next wave. Yet it also evokes a slow dawning, a hairline crack of light at the horizon that gradually widens and spreads. 

Rhythmic elements lend structure to some tracks, giving pure pools of sound an element of drive and progression. The first track, “The Moment Everything Became Clear,” swirls and envelops a dance beat, moving like clouds of smoke over wireframe architecture. The intentionally ambiguous “Moving Forward Into” clatters and rattles with percussion, as electronics suggest billowing fogs glinting with keyboards, sax and guitar. It’s the most melodic and song-like of these cuts, with the thickest gloss of 1970s new age music. 

A couple of these cuts incorporate vocals in dreamy, faintly Middle Eastern mode. The title cut, for instance, weaves a woman’s voice (uncredited on the bandcamp.com page) through clouds of ominous tone. This one also pounds with organic drums, grounding it and giving it weight. It’s the best cut on the disc, still mysterious but with an aura of the real. 

This sort of music can easily slip towards the background, an aural “om” that calms and blocks out distractions. Still these distractions are life itself, and the music is better when it lets them in. 

Jennifer Kelly

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Listening Post: Diamond Seas

Diamond Seas (Geffen) is plunderphonics virtuoso John Oswald’s treatment of Sonic Youth’s “The Diamond Sea.” The song, among the longest that Sonic Youth ever recorded, first appeared in 1995 on Washing Machine (DGC). Thurston Moore noted that the LP “hearken[ed] back to records like Sister where [Sonic Youth] would write a bunch of songs, go into the studio for a month, put them down, then go on the road and play them for a year. By the end of the year, they’d mutate into something much more excited.” This reviewer really likes Moore’s usage of “excited,” rather than the more conventional “exciting” — as if the songs took on their own moods, explored enthusiastic potentialities of their own making.

Oswald might be more engaged by Moore’s notion of “mutation.” The two tracks on Diamond Seas are constructed from multiple instances of “The Diamond Sea” out on the road, being played live night after night. Side A is Oswald’s layering and sequencing of performances of “The Diamond Sea” from 1995; Side B comprises sounds from versions of the song from 1996. The plunderphonics approach might be an effective vehicle for indexing some of the mutations the song underwent over the first couple years of its life (emphasis on that “might”…).

Diamond Seas recalls Grayfolded (1994), Oswald’s storied plunderphonics version of “Dark Star,” one of the Grateful Dead’s early career launchpads for longform improvisation. The comparison may extend beyond Oswald’s methodology: “psychedelic” and “jam” are frequently used terms in discussions of “The Diamond Sea” and are all but synonymous with the Dead. One wonders about the adequacy of those terms, in either case.

Intro by Jonathan Shaw

Jonathan Shaw: I am finding Diamond Seas a lot more interesting than I thought I might, though most of that interest has been generated by the 1996 side, which departs more intensely from the original song. What are the rest of you hearing and thinking?

Bill Meyer: When it came out, I warmed up to Washing Machine right away, more so that other mid-90s Sonic Youth records, and “The Diamond Sea” had a lot to do with it. As a whole, the album seemed to reconcile SY’s pop and improvisational sides more naturally than anything that came before it, and I equally liked the material from either end of the spectrum. But I also remember skipping the rest of the album and cueing up “The Diamond Sea” on the CD player many times. The very existence of this project suggests that someone in the SY camp sees “The Diamond Sea” as their “Dark Star,” so it makes sense that they’d give it the Grayfolded treatment.

Jennifer Kelly: I know that Lee Ranaldo was a big Dead Head early on, and Thurston has talked about them, too. So it makes sense that they might see parallels between their longer, more improvisational stuff and the Dead’s.

I’m shocked to find that I like Grayfolded LOTS more than Diamond Seas, the reverse of how I feel about the originals. The Sonic Youth mixes have so much chatter and crowd noise and the Dead ones focus almost entirely on the music. Also, the more you like something, the less you want it fucked with. Could be that.

I’ve been looking for articles/interviews about Oswald’s process and not finding any. Anybody know any good ones?

Bill Meyer: First of all, here is a link to some fairly old interviews with Oswald on his plunderphonics site. He was an early practitioner of what one might characterize as skeptical, critical sampling. He has also been a free improviser, playing saxophone.

Jonathan Shaw: Like Bill, I really like Washing Machine, but more for the spikier songs on it: “Junkie’s Promise,” the title track, “Becuz.” I can lock in on “The Diamond Sea” sometimes, but I would rather listen to “Expressway to Yr Skull” for that extended SY thing. Might be why I respond to the 1996 side of Diamond Seas as strongly as I do. The defamiliarizing and the way crowd sounds and the long periods of aggro amp abuse dig into the structure of the original tune reveal a different experience.

For me the overlaps between this record and Grayfolded feel right because I was going to Dead shows at the same time that I was tuning in to Sister and checking out SY live. Unfortunately, even in 1987, which a lot of Heads are fond of, the Dead were pretty brittle as a live act. The SY shows I saw were musically thrilling, the Dead shows were primarily a social environment.

So I am having the inverse experience from Jenny’s. Grayfolded is interesting, but Diamond Seas — especially that second side — lights me up musically.

Jennifer Kelly: Thanks, I did read that one, but I was more interested in how it works. Like are the different samples of the same thing arranged sequentially or do they overlap? Could you have the bass from one show and the drums from another at the same time?

I guess I see the point of making sound collages from multiple sources (it’s another way of composing with prerecorded notes instead of instruments) but not so much of the same song.

I gather that the respective bands commissioned both of these projects?

Bill Meyer: Regarding Grayfolded, I can easily imagine it appealing even if you aren’t a Deadhead. “Dark Star” is very much its own thing. What Oswald did with it is pretty different from what he did to “The Diamond Sea,” and the outcomes are correspondingly different.

Grayfolded is like a stretch version of “Dark Star” that does not mess with its essential structure. The tune’s landmarks happen in roughly the same spots as when the Dead played the song, it just takes a lot longer to get there. However, I think that Oswald had access to every “Dark Star” recording in the Dead’s archive, so he could jump between years and versions of the band with every edit. Each side of Diamond Seas is drawn from one year, but neither side retains the tune’s original structure. Instead, they’re like three-dimensional sculptures made out of pieces of a given year’s “The Diamond Sea.”

Oswald did plunderphonics first under his own steam. I think that commissions came after he got cool because he got into predictable trouble for appropriating copywritten material, but doing something recognizable artistic with it.

Jonathan Shaw: I don’t get the sense that individual instruments from individual performances were isolated and then sequenced alongside one another. In the case of Diamond Seas, for sure there are instances in which multiple performances are layered. I really like the density of those moments.

My sense of Grayfolded is that Bill is largely right about the stretched nature of the thing, especially if the Spring 1969 versions of “Dark Star” are considered the foundational texts of the song. There are some later “Dark Stars” that dispense with the intro and outro verses entirely and only briefly engage the key melody. Interesting to think of “Dark Star” having “landmarks,” a cognitive map of the song to hang on to while the Dead drifted and cooked and audiences did their thing too.

Christian Carey: John Oswald certainly treats it as something as durable as “Dark Star.”

Bill Meyer: My impression is that Diamond Seas is made from bigger and smaller pieces of performances. Occasionally a structure is emulated for a spell, as when the lyrics are laid out in the original sequence on the 1995 piece, but each line sounds like it comes a different version recorded in a different theater. But especially on the 1996 version there’ll be a recognizable fragment mixed into the foreground with two or three chunks of chronologically unrelated noise deployed around it. It’s more of a collage made out of Diamond Seas than a stretch limo edition.

Jonathan Shaw: I think the least effective portion of Diamond Seas is in the 1995 side, when Oswald splices together Moore’s vocals in the song’s first verse. A travelogue of sorts, from room to room and performance to performance. But sonically it doesn’t work. Maybe the less he attempts to follow the song’s logics, the more interesting ideas he has.

On the other hand, I like all the stage banter he puts in. SY’s personality and name-dropping tendencies are trackable. No particular shade, there. They knew lots of interesting people.

Ian Mathers: Well, as our resident Sonic Youth... let’s say “skeptic,” first I had to go back and listen to the original “The Diamond Sea” (it’s possible I played it a few times ago years ago, when I kept listening to different SY albums hoping I’d start loving them like I expected to, but I retained little if anything about the experience). One of my big roadblocks with the band is my visceral dislike of Moore’s singing/vocals, so the very beginning didn’t do much for me. But once the whole thing spins off... I may have heard very little Grateful Dead in my life so far, but I was raised by a man who loved the Allman Brothers Band and Neil Young, and safe to say “The Diamond Sea” instantly vaulted onto my short list of good SY tracks by virtue of sounding a bit like some of the latter more extended live explorations.

So it’s maybe not surprising that I agree with Jonathan that the noisier, denser 1996 side of Diamond Seas is my favorite. And I even like the aggressiveness of how the crowd noise is mixed in mid-track on both sides, although fitting with what Jenny said, I am pretty open to Oswald messing with the track a lot.

I’m not super familiar with Oswald’s efforts, and still have to listen to Grayfolded (which I’ve been intrigued by since reading the Rolling Stone review of it back in the day). I’ve also just realized the Bandcamp edition of it appears slightly different than all the other ones I’ve seen? It’s even got version notes!

Christian Carey: The question always for me with Oswald’s work is intention. Is plundering meant to take a celebratory, intellectual, ironic, or destructive stance? What value does he impart to the material? I find the use of spoken word to be a clue that this is a celebratory project. What do you all think?

Jennifer Kelly: And one that Sonic Youth commissioned. Maybe that’s why I found the crowd noise self-serving.

Bill Meyer: Yeah, this was commissioned, and while I have not heard all of Oswald’s commissions, I am not aware of him biting the hand that feeds him.

Bryon Hayes: My belief is that Oswald originally meant sonic plundering as a means of questioning what a musical instrument is, what constitutes a composition and the ownership over it, and so on. He writes about it in his paper“Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative” from 1985. As Bill said earlier, bands started commissioning him to plunder their works, as he became sort of a “cool” transgressor of copyright laws, I guess. So his intentions have likely shifted over time, as well as his M.O.

This particular record is kind of a walk down memory lane for me, as Sonic Youth soundtracked my high school years and if the Detroit shows from 1995 are included in the mix, then I was there (getting kicked in the head by a stage diver during the Washing Machine show at State Theater). I remember when that album came out, thinking that Sonic Youth finally made a “pretty” song with “The Diamond Sea,” wrestling with it. I preferred their noisier side, so I thought that it was a tip of the hat to the fans of their earlier material that they made the song so long and jammy.

I am really enjoying this release, and the nostalgia factor amplifies my enjoyment even more!!

Jennifer Kelly: I’m puzzled about intent, too, though. I’m not sure what this adds to what we know about the song or Sonic Youth.

Bryon Hayes: And to your point, Jenny, reading Oswald’s paper leads me to a question: is this a Sonic Youth record, or a John Oswald record, or both?

Jennifer Kelly: I feel like the multi-source plunderphonics records — like DJ Shadow’s Entroducing and Avalanches and Jason Forrest’s stuff — do make something new out of their material. I’m not sure this does. Though I also have some nostalgia for Sonic Youth live, it was mostly the music, not the interstitial banter.

Both of these records are conceptually interesting, but I wouldn’t run out and buy either one.

Bill Meyer: I suspect Oswald would prefer to muddy the waters of authorship and ownership.

Jonathan Shaw: Great questions from Christian and Byron. Diamond Seas seem clearly to be an Oswald record to me. That may explain some of the disappointment and discomfiture among SY superfans.

My intellectual training has made questions of intent hard for me to think effectively. I am more interested in what can be heard and interpreted — not saying that’s the right way to see things, but the post-structuralism can do a long-term number on you if you read a lot of it in your 20s. Inasmuch as I understand the “plunder,” I like the usage. Pirates plunder stuff, and exert a measure of control over it, but that’s not ownership, as Bill notes. Rather it moves the material into an unregulated zone. Sam Delany argued in his SF books of the mid-70s that those sorts of sites, of free investigation and play, are especially crucial for innovation.

Christian Carey: Is it a Sonic Youth or a John Oswald record is a great question. If you were looking for it at Princeton Record Exchange, they would certainly file it under Sonic Youth.

Mason Jones: It’s taken me some time to listen and think about this, and I’m still unsure what my take is. I appreciate Oswald’s ideas, but somehow, I don’t feel that this is a successful application of them. Ultimately, I’m left wondering what this adds, and what purpose it serves. Perhaps comparing it to Grayfolded is too simple, but that work took the original and expanded it while to my ears staying within the same philosophical approach, and as a result it became a larger, more extended version that was in some ways “more” than the original. While I’m very much not a Deadhead, I can still appreciate what Oswald accomplished, and I think Dead fans can find in it something new yet connected.

In the case of Diamond Seas, I’m not feeling that. I know the original song well, and heard it played live at least once or twice. For me, this release doesn’t add to it, but simply swaps parts in an approach that feels both too easy conceptually and too lightweight compositionally. I don’t find any reason why I might prefer to listen to this rather than the original song, since I don’t find “more” or really anything very different. It comes across as clever trickery in search of aesthetics, rather than something aesthetically pleasing with elements of cleverness.

Jonathan Shaw: Mason’s and Jenny’s criticisms of Diamond Seas are well put, but they assume that “The Diamond Sea” is the principal aesthetic object or text against which Oswald’s record should be judged. I don’t, so I am not hoping to “find more” or “learn something new” about SY. I love that big, dissonant middle section of the 1996 side. The layering and sequencing gets me somewhere.

I know a bunch of “Dark Stars” very, very well, and for the best of them, I prize them in their individual instances as the particular things they are. That might also contribute to why I don’t respond as strongly to Grayfolded as a musical experience. In that case, I’d rather listen to one of the “Dark Stars,” situated in a specific show from 1969 or 1970 or 1972.

Bill Meyer: I appreciate your first point, Jonathan. 40-odd years after I first heard them, I don’t feel like I need to learn anything about Sonic Youth. I just want to hear their best sounds. I will echo the appreciation for the 1996 side because it’s less concerned with the structure of the song and more concerned with collaging hunks of noise.

Ian Mathers: Relistening to Diamond Seas again last night, the difference for me between the two sides is getting pretty stark (and in ways that are maybe in line with some of the discussion here). I equally feel like I don’t need to learn anything about SY, from the other direction. It felt like I was sitting through “Diamond Seas 1995,” although it passed quickly enough. I don’t have much nostalgia here (my high school engagement with the band was trying to get through all of Daydream Nation instead of just playing “Teen Age Riot” again), like Jenny I don’t get much out of the crowd noise, and it just feels like a lackluster version of what’s going on with “Diamond Seas 1996.” If they’d released the latter as a one-off, I’d be more into it.

I do appreciate that Oswald appears to be something less straightforward here than, say, this compilation of 11 versions of the Stooges’ “Dirt” from the Fun House played at the same time.

And yet, I ultimately have more fun listening to “Dddddiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrtttttttt,” and I suspect that’s not down to just preferring the source material. Something about randomness versus conscious shaping, maybe? I did a quick look to see if Oswald has done any interviews around his work here and didn’t turn up anything, but did find out that 1996 was the last year they ever played “The Diamond Sea live. Here I had been assuming Oswald/the band had just picked a couple of prime years for its live incarnation, instead of the last. Correctly or not, that feels connected to either the performances from 1996 or how Oswald has piled them on.

I also see that at least a good chunk of the vocal SY fans on reddit do not like this album. “Unlistenable” has been thrown around, which feels funny when if anything I wish “Diamond Seas 1996” took things even further into noise.

Justin Cober-Lake: I’m sort of in the middle of opinions on this work. I don’t see why SY fans would find it “unlistenable” — it seems to work for me in a lot of the same ways that Sonic Youth works (and while I’m a longtime fan, this track isn’t one I’ve returned to regularly). I feel a little bit like Mason does in wondering why I would go for this version rather than the original, even if there’s something interesting about it. In that sense, the conversation makes me think that there are multiple ways of approaching this record, which, in my own listening, sometimes come together and sometimes don’t:

1) Is it a good/enjoyable piece of music? Yes, especially 1996 for the reasons that everyone (here and elsewhere) is hearing. Devoid of context, I kind of like it, even if “devoid of context” is an unreachable state.

2) Is it good as a theoretical/aesthetic/compositional/whatever project? I don’t have a strong opinion here, having not taken a dive into Oswald’s whole thing not spent proper time with Grayfolded or other plunderphonic works. I can see how someone else might want to nerd out on it, though, in probably fruitful ways.

3) Does it add to my understanding of or thinking about Sonic Youth or “The Diamond Sea?” For me, it’s a no. It is certainly much better that the “Dirt” thing Ian mentioned, partly just by being a more sincere look at the music. Like Ian, I wish the original went further into noise, too, but there’s SY that does that. This feels a little bit like play to me, and I have no objection to that, but I’m not likely to reach for this over the original and, having listened to it a few times, I haven’t really been compelled to push more into, and I probably wouldn’t even have reached for the original again had it not been for this conversation. Even so, I like that it exists, because the idea at least is provocative, even if this particular release leaves me a little uninspired.

Bill Meyer: As far as context is concerned, I think that Diamond Seas can be seen as part of a long-term project to keep SY alive in people’s minds a decade and a half after the band packed it in. Like many other long in the tooth / retired artists (Can, Wire, Neil Young, the Grateful Dead), they have released a stream of archival live material. They even relented and put out an official version of Walls Have Ears, which was conspicuous by its absence, a couple years ago. This might seem to them like a more creative way of nurturing their commercial presence than another live album.

Michael Rosenstein: I’m curious as to what, if any, connections Oswald sees between his plunderphonics projects and his alto sax playing in improvised settings. Oddly, while I’ve heard Oswald as an improviser, I’ve not heard any of his plunderphonics. I have zero interest in Grayfolded. I listened to and saw the Dead a bunch in the early to mid 1970s. But after seeing Pharoah Sanders live in 1973, I increasingly lost interest in the Dead’s noodling. And I only saw Sonic Youth once, shortly before their breakup and have barely listened to any of their records. But I’ve been listening to Oswald as an improviser since the early 1980s. I think I first came across his playing on Moose and Salmon, his trio with Henry Kaiser and Toshinori Kondo.

I also got a chance to see him with CCMC, the Toronto-based collective including Michael Snow and Paul Dutton, as well as in a duo with pianist Paul Plimley. Taking a quick look at Oswald’s Discogs page, it appears that he still occasionally plays in improv settings. From what I know about his plunderphonics projects, I don’t hear any of those strategies coming through in any of these improvised settings, but I may be missing something.

Bill Meyer: I have never encountered any discussion of the links between his sampling work and his improvised work. The interviews I have seen barely acknowledge his playing.

[dustedmagazine]

Drakulas — Midnight City (Dirtnap)

Drakulas are a Texas punk band, three of them veterans of the Riverboat Gamblers, all native to the same Denton nexus that birthed the Marked Men, Radioactivity and Bad Sports. (The great, now sporadically active Dirtnap Records released records from all these bands as well as this one.) Yet while Riverboat Gamblers were frenetic but straightforward Ramones-style garage rockers, Drakulas has a bit more new wave in its DNA. 

“Going Going Gone Gone” thumps and pillages, true, but with style and a certain amount of decadence. The hammer of drums, the giant guitar chords are block simple, but the vocals vibrate with lurid romanticism, and the keyboards gleam with futurism. Sophistication goes slightly rotten, grand gestures turn theatrical, and all within the 4/4 framework. It’s like the Marked Men crossed with Chain and the Gang, 

Drakulas are heavily influenced by a 1970s New York City aesthetic, not just the glam punk music scene around the New York Dolls and Suicide, but the art, film and fashion of that period (notice the turtlenecks?). There’s a lot of sex, drugs and rock ’n roll involved. “Let me wipe the white off your nose,” sings Wiebe in one song. “Guys like me ain’t supposed to have sex with girls like you,” he confides in another. He’s sneaking off to a girl’s mother’s room to have sex in “Going Going Gone Gone.” “Sex” is an album highlight, with its soccer cheer chorus (of “Se-eh-eh-ex”), its spiked guitars strutting like the ones in Franz Ferdinand or maybe Yummy Fur. 

New York City wasn’t all damaged glamor in the 1970s. It was filthy and dangerous, too. Razorwire “Garbage Strike” balances the muck and the allure, the punk and the glam on a nervy knife edge. Good song. Good band. 

Jennifer Kelly

[dustedmagazine]

Play Time — Magic Object (Balmat)

Photo by Linnéa Gad

This freshly inaugurated trio of Booker Stardrum (drums), Ben Vida (synth), and Will Epstein (sax) emerges fully formed on their debut album, Magic Object. Given the players’ pedigree with multiple other projects and artists, including SML, Darkside, and Lea Bertucci, it’s no surprise that this is confident and colorful straight out of the gate. Motorik drum parts, squiggly synth arpeggios, and rapidly cycling saxophone phrases lock together in intricate interplay. It immediately brings to mind 1960s electronic pioneers Silver Apples, especially on “Public Broadcast,” which is a dead ringer for “Oscillations.”

If the whole record was as breakneck as its most breathless stretches, it would quickly become disorientating and exhausting. Thankfully the trio are smart enough to modulate the music’s intensity across the album’s 40 minutes. After the brisk, ear-grabbing one-two of “Open the Door, Joey” and “Q & A,” “Wanderers” is a welcome change of pace, dialing back the tempo and introducing some smoky Middle Eastern-tinged mystery. While the majority of the tracks are intensified by Vida’s buzzing electronics, the title track pares back his synths to sparse hissing and bubbling, occasionally accenting the flow rather than raising it to a boil. On “22º Halo,” Stardrum is the player taking a back seat, peppering the space with tumbling toms rather than driving the music forward with gusto.

Each track exhaustively explores its own distinctive terrain, ensuring there’s plenty of engaging scenery across the album’s runtime. The only facet that feels a little lacking is the players taking more risks within the project’s rigorously defined parameters. Given this is their debut outing together, it’ll be exciting to hear where they venture next.

Tim Clarke

[dustedmagazine]

The Mekons — Horrorble (Mekons vs Tony Maimone In Dub Conference) (Fire)

Photo by Gabi Rojas

The Mekons’ Horror, released earlier this year, was already pretty frightening, concerned with colonialism, economic inequality, climate change and other catastrophes. This dub version, mixed by Pere Ubu’s Tony Maimone, plays up the unease with cavernous echo and ghostly keening. Maimone finds the surreal core of these songs, paring down the rock instruments to build shadowy, skeletal architectures. “A Horse Has Escaped,” for example, strands Sally Timms in a haunted house of mirrors, her tremulous soprano wandering through fever-dream snare cadences and synth flourishes. “You’re Not Singing Anymore” transforms itself from a reassuring sing-along to an empty room’s echo of long-ago communal music. “Surrender”’s deathly pale celebration of love and dissolution rambles forward on a clip-clopping rhythm, surely sourced from a horse who has passed on from this world.

Horrorble arises out of a four-decade collaboration with Maimone; he and the Mekons met on a 1988 UK tour and he played bass for the band on another 1991 European tour. In 2015, Maimone was mixing a batch of live tunes that later turned up on Horror. A statement from the Mekons explained, “We had a feeling they might have some sort of secret double life. So much potential and split decisions that could’ve gone either way. Tony was the man to get his tools out and see what lurked beneath to make it truly Horrorble.”

These are all ghost stories at heart, none more so than the closer, “Before the Ice Age” which takes shape like an ectoplasm out of the thump of drum, a languid guitar, a trembling organ tone. Sally Timms’ whispery voice, high and sing-song, makes a tentative path through ominous, unreal landscape. “All the lies I’ve been told come around to taunt, shapeless ghosts coil, writhe and creep, frozen with a fear that will never learn to speak,” she intimates in a sonic landscape that dwarfs her tiny form. It’s chilling and beautiful.

The dub element is subtle and atmospheric mostly, a matter of echoing bass lines and vaulting sonic space, but it takes a more literal form in Maimone’s version of “Mudcrawlers.” The song includes a raspy, impassioned cameo from Benji Webbe of the UK dancehall band Skindred, which connects the Mekons’ memorialization of the Irish Potato Famine to the ravages of third-world oppression. It’s one of the best of the re-imaginations, worth the cost of the ticket all on its own.

You might have your doubts about whether you need a song-by-song dub remix of the last Mekons’ album, whose acerbic poetry and untethered rock energy stood on its own. And possibly need is a strong word. You don’t really. But you might enjoy this anyway, regardless of whether you heard the source material a lot or not at all.

Jennifer Kelly

[dustedmagazine]

Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri — Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun (Black Knoll Editions)

Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri have independently created some stunning ambient-drone over recent years, including Mogard’s Circular Forms (2015) and Irisarri’s The Shameless Years (2017). Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun is the duo’s third collaborative release, following 2024’s Impossibly Distant, Impossibly Close and 2025’s Live at Le Guess Who? The raw materials for this new collection originally came together during a three-day live residency at Morphine Raum in Berlin, with Mogard on synths and Irisarri on guitar. The sound masses accumulated during those performances were later hewn in the studio, then cello (Martina Bertoni), and violin and vocal (Andrea Burelli) overdubs were added. The resulting six-track suite is testament to the emotive power of gradually evolving sustained tones.

Opener “In the Eastern Wild” fades into view with delicate, flute-like textures, the music’s density gradually building until the piece is a thick wall of humming vibration, slowly swirling with modulation. “Over the Domes” differentiates between an airy upper register and deep, growling bass below, as the midrange is gradually filled out with what sounds like a descending electric guitar line. “A Blue Descent” introduces Bertoni’s cello, which emerges out of the clouds of melancholic synths, sounding initially almost like a saxophone. The cello lines double and darken, then the synths thin out, leaving the stark beauty of the cellos circling each other.

“In a Quiet Radiance” is the album’s glorious heart, with Burelli’s violin shining through. It musters an atmosphere of graceful yearning, as Burelli’s vocal colours the upper registers. After this stretch of relative peace, “Of Blessed Ages” feels like an ominous weather system rolling in, crackling with electricity. It threatens to burst forth, but withholds. “Among Shadows” ends the album on an uneasy note. The music is tentative and hesitant until a cloud of static builds and synth tones flush the stereo space like massed bees.

Tim Clarke

[dustedmagazine]

Äxe — Autogeddon (Caligari)

A brief list of scenarios approximating what it’s like to listen to Äxe’s Autogeddon:

Transpose the motorcycle pursuit sequence from Katsuhiro Otomo’s film version of Akira (1988) onto highways in William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA (1985). Soundtrack by pick-up band formed by members of GISM, Venom and the Shaggs.

Load up Danny Boyle with a massive dose of Adderall and lock him in a room with a Super 8 camera and a semi-functional Tyco slot car racetrack. Soundtrack sourced from field recordings of the Ford River Rouge Complex, Dearborn MI, December 1977 (mixed by Lou Reed in a very surly mood).

Animate Ralph Steadman’s illustrations for the opening highway scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). Let Roger Corman direct. Soundtrack with forgotten practice recordings from the Trans-Love house in Ann Arbor, c 1968.

Create a filmstrip of rejected drawings from Philippe Druillet’s La Nuit (1976) and project on the wall of an abandoned petrol station outside Brighton, UK, while a damaged dub of Voivod’s War and Pain (1984) plays on a battered Toshiba boombox.

Curate an exhibition of John Chamberlain sculptures for display in the entry area of a Costco in Memphis, TN. Audio guide playing on distributed headphones features the opening guitar solo from Saxon’s “The Eagle Has Landed” (1983), 1:07-1:28, at 3x speed in a continuous loop.

Assemble a replica of a 2005 Harley-Davidson Road King out of empty Coors Light cans, Cheez Whiz and whatever you can scrounge from the Army Navy Store in Schenectady, NY. Find the top of the nearest hill with a 17% grade. Mount replica. Set it on fire. Roll.

(Please note that these stunts have been performed by professionals. Do not attempt at home. Do obtain a copy of Äxe’s Autogeddon if any of the above sounds like your kind of a good time.)

Jonathan Shaw

[dustedmagazine]

Tashi Dorji and Chris Corsano — Live at Ritual Botanica (Feeding Tube Records)

Tashi Dorji and Chris Corsano’s musical chemistry is the main thing keeping Live at Ritual Botanica afloat. Both veterans of free improvisation, they share an uncanny ability to create the impression of melody and order without out ever quite settling into a groove. This new partnership yields four tracks, three hovering around ten minutes and one much shorter to close the project, and, while the record never veers outside the conventions of its genre, the duet of ever-shifting, almost-structured voices has an electrifyingly ethereal quality.

Both Dorji and Corsano adhere to enough musical conventions to lull one into a false sense of security. The first track, “Parallel Deceptions” is deceptive in its seeming danceability, with hints of groove–fast arpeggios and occasional bursts of feedback in the guitar and a repetitive, rain-on-a-tin-roof drum line interspersed with fluttering cymbals and hi-hat crescendo, then drop out, then crescendo again. The climax, in which Dorji builds upon his two-note riff until it’s monolithic, is the closest the record gets to rock music. Nothing quite manages to lock into place, but it never quite falls out — a nearly rhythmic space that’s constantly questioning itself.

But after the first track, this feeling of normalcy gives way to stylistic collage. Dorji and Corsano can switch between ideas at a moment’s notice. On “Finite Volumes,” Dorji builds tension with wails of feedback and skittering guitar lines that pop into and out of focus before erupting in the track’s final third into a sea of jagged, atonal stabs occasionally interspersed with minimalist riffs; while halfway through “Catch,” he cuts through the haze of drums and echoing guitar with a dirge-like riff that winds the music down to a crawl, offering one of the record’s few melodic moments.

As with Dorjii’s guitar playing, the constant stylistic jumps in Corsano’s drumming never lack intentionality — he’ll switch to laid-back jazz drums for a few seconds before opting for something heavier, more rock-adjacent. In “Catch,” he’ll frequently lock into grooves for a measure or two before moving into something near-industrial. “Parallel Deceptions” is full of euphoric, rolling bursts of percussion, while on “Finite Volumes” Corsano is all over the kit, allowing different fragments to emerge from the background haze for just a few moments before fading back out of focus. Corsano, as in much of his work, paints using negative space.

I recently had the pleasure of seeing Corsano with Joe Baiza and Mike Watt, speak ahead of a set in St. Louis. Throughout the conversation, he talked about how listening is one of the most important parts of improvisation; that improvisation relies heavily on communication and collaboration between artists. Dorji has released a number of solo projects which, often to their deficit, are always unaccompanied. He’s an excellent improviser, but it’s in communication and collaboration that the music is truly able to breathe. Together, Dorji and Corsano swell to great heights and, following the traditional contours of tension and release, ultimately wind back down as one. Occasionally one or the other will take the stage — Corsano’s drum solo toward the back end of “Catch” is a record highlight — but neither player ever feels more important than the other. The three longer tracks follow roughly the same trajectory — a bed of formless dissonance and percussive noodling slowly grows in intensity before collapsing again — but they play off each other’s strengths well enough that it never becomes stale.

Elijah Riker

[dustedmagazine]

Knitting — Souvenir (Mint)

Two guitars writhe in slow motion menace in this second album from Montreal-based knitting, as Mischa Dempsey and Sarah Harris bend their axes in sinuous sprawl. Vocals—that’s Dempsey—float feather-soft in the turmoil, a hypnotic drone against the churn of rock instruments. It’s like Lush with a strong undertow of Nirvana, dream-pop edging into dystopia.

The band took shape out of COVID-era home recording sessions, which culminated in knitting’s 2021 self-titled cassette. Three years later, Some Kind of Heaven followed, hitching grunge’s threat and discontent to the whispery delicacy of, say, Cocteau Twins. Souvenir buildson these volatile energies, with a denser, more guitar-centric sound, that nonetheless leaves room for sleepy reverie.  

Consider “I Want to Remember Everything,” with its slow march of guitar chords, its pounding drums, all muscle in the instruments. Yet Dempsey’s singing is soft balm, a voice you hear as you wake from a dream. “I never wanted to wish you away/I hold my head in a liminal space,” they croon, in lucid but faraway tones. If ever a band inhabited “liminal space,” this one does.

Or take the sheeny blare of “I Wasn’t Fully Cooked,” a wall of guitars and bass and cymbals loud and visceral enough to shake your soft tissues. It parts for lyricism, a bare and vulnerable verse that insinuates a place for itself and speaks, still, of the isolation of the pandemic. “And when my muscle memory crumbles into a fossil tucked into the ground,” breathes Dempsey. “Like a tree that’s fallen down with nobody else around to hear it, will it make a sound?“

It makes sense that knitting came out of the COVID pandemic, a terrifying period where, disturbingly, everything looked exactly the same as always. And, indeed, Souvenir is maybe music for our 21st century disasters, where forebodings about the climate and other existential threats rumble through the textures of everyday life, soft and pretty and roiling with violence.

Jennifer Kelly

[dustedmagazine]

Goetia — Mortuary Cult (Carbonized)

Photo by Travis Stone

What’s in a name? Or, in the case of DC-based Goetia, what’s in a subgenre identifier? If one is to believe promo chatter and Bandcamp tags, Goetia is a straight-up death metal band. All the semiotics check out: the band’s name is also (and primarily) the title of a section of an ancient grimoire, taxonomizing the 72 demons King Solomon is alleged to have harnessed to build the Temple of Jerusalem (that’s the “Ars Goetia” of the Clavicula Salomonis Regis, if you must know…). Song titles are almost comically on the nose: the title track, “Lanterns of the Dead,” “Bestial Tomb” and so on. The music? It casts a different sort of spell.

Check out the first nine or so minutes of Mortuary Cult, and, absent the above info, you’d likely imagine you’re listening to a crossover band or maybe a hardcore-adjacent grind outfit. The pace is punishingly intense, in part set by the excellent percussion of Nadia Tydings-Lynch (who also drums for grinding death metal monsters Blood Monolith, grind band Deliriant Nerve and powerviolence purveyors Brain Tourniquet). Vocals from Matt Scott are harsh but more hoarse than glottal, in the mode of a hardcore or crust act. The dominant sensibility is muscular and ruthlessly fast.

On the longer songs — like “Corpse Candle” or “Earth Inferno,” which cluster at the middle of the record — Goetia’s death metal ambitions are somewhat clearer, especially in the tunes’ compositions. The dive bombs come heavy and hard, and the riffage and soloing are appropriately gruesome. But it’s still the case that the sonic sensibility rides a (hugely pleasurable) line between crisp and ragged, an aesthetic well fit for underground thrash.

However we wish to split hairs, the principal object at issue here is the music. Goetia makes a variety of hybrid heavy music that’s replete with the excellent time the band seems to be having playing the songs. Their excitement is infectious. Mortuary Cult provides a listening experience that we could characterize as “fun,” if fun didn’t seem entirely beside the point.

Jonathan Shaw

[dustedmagazine]

Max Knouse — Goat Pupil (Ruination)

Max Knouse is so laid back he might tip over on this minimalist country folk record. The songwriter, from Oregon, sometimes tours and plays with Califone, another band that can kick haunting melody up out of the dust, but he shares none of their multi-tonal, multi-rhythmic fascination with rhythm. Drums and bass, played respectively by Ben Lumsdaine and Bailey Zick, stay present but simple, a sleepy swing in their slapping concord.

The main event, however, remains Knouse’s thready tenor and deep-in-the-pocket licks. His bent towards surreality begs comparisons with Michael Hurley. In somnolent “Like a Rocket Stage,” he contemplates an infestation of bees in his kitchen; the landlord explains they’re just looking for a hive. It’s just off reality, possibly a metaphor, but delivered in a slow, plain-folks drawl. It blends down-home charm and otherworldly mystery and goofy humor. Lend out your phone to a stranger, Knouse’s friend warns, and you’re going to get a late night return call, at “2 and 3 and 4.”

Really simple, really unadorned songs can turn tedious quickly in the wrong hands. The scrubbed bare magic only works for performers who can imbue their songs with spirit. Knouse does this best in late album track “Gold Leaf and a Silver Alert,” the song with the loveliest melody, the most heartfelt delivery. There’s a real Neil Young feel to the acoustic picking here and some of Buck Meek’s naked vulnerability. “Angel’s Share” is also quite good, its acoustic guitar shadowed by surprisingly rowdy bass plunks and slaps of offbeat snare. The verse ruminates on what it was like to be young and untethered. “It’s raining down where you and Carly live/ I’m 19 just off a graveyard shift/pouring myself back in the shape you know/two skinny legs in a long brown coat,” Knouse confides in a casual, talk-sung way, then moves towards the chorus, much sweeter with fillips and slides embedded in the tune. “That’s all right, I’m leaving you the angel’s share,” sings Knouse.

This is not the kind of album that stops you in your tracks right away. It’ll grow on you over multiple listens until what sounded plain turns rich with emotion and true.

Jennifer Kelly