While fans of The National wait for a potential 11th studio album, their singer-songwriter returns with his second solo release, one that captures similar intimacy, melancholy and also expansiveness with songs about uncertainty and anxiety with a certain poignant catharsis. The album can also be musically striking, from the gentle stabbing chords and soft vocal harmonies and intricate electronica that introduce his close-mic, deep crooner style on opener Inland Ocean, the syncopated drums and piano of No Love, and that since of unease, even in the face of success: “This place has a sinking feeling/ The energy's so strange / No one can tell what the difference is between spine and fame.” Bonnet of Pins meanwhile goes for a classic guitar rock intro and a wistful, melancholy tone. There’s plenty of poetic, and dark, within lyrics, ones that are abstract but also vivid. On the gentle, deep-voice delivery of Junk, for example, which is really a tender love song: “Crows, bones, and ashes and neverending roaches / That’s what I’m betting on as morning approaches.” Breaking Into Acting, a duet of with Meg Duffy of Hand Habits, is a slow acoustic, is an oddball paring vocally, but gently explores the exhausting performance of forgiveness. A slow, classy, downbeat caress of an an album, other highlights include Little By Little, and the wistful closer Times of Difficulty. That sinking feeling is certainly quite buoyant in songwriting terms. Out on Concord Records.
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