An absolutely gorgeous, delicate, subtle, brilliantly inventive LP of folk-rock-country-pop by the Brooklyn-based guitarist, improviser, composer and singer-songwriter, themed around the artist’s newfound queerness and love, all coloured by a sense of personal awe and reinvention. That particularly comes apparent on Old Myth Dying in which Eisenberg sings in a fevered register, over polyrhythmic guitar playing, about knowing what you can and can’t control. The pedal-steeled Will You Dare, for example, is about love and the passage of time, which “has a funny way of laying you bare … It pulls you and scares you and tangles your hair/Asking: will you dare?” The delicious chamber-strings and finger-picked Take A Number works up to these closing lyrics: “You are the oldest you’ve ever been / Did you feel yourself change?” and has a flavour of Joanna Newsom. Meaning Business (written following David Lynch’s death) has fluid guitar flourishes, changing rhyths and strums with a fiddle-country flavour but an ambiguous, bittersweet uncertainty: “Everything got better but the world / For the very first time / I saw it completely align / But I don’t see the little kid that grew so fast and I really miss her.”
The dreamlike centrepiece Another Lifetime Floats Away traces the sweep of a life, how the past inhabits us and tends to flood back at will and describes the nature of time, which can never turn back with images - their mother making breakfast; their dad working; their adventurous 20s, touring Northeast highways—while also describing the present moment from which the song was crafted: “All that I want prefers to taunt me with a half-lost memory / I can’t really see from where I sit / Is that how I wound up here?”. It’s Here is a beautiful, floating number exploring “the consciousness afforded by true love” blinking in the almost unreality of true happiness between steel guitar and Wurlitzer, major and minor chords and finally the declaration that whatever it is, repeating with wonder that: “It’s here”. Vanity Paradox, then Curious Bird swirls restlessly with brilliant compositional intelligence, holding emotions and uncertainty and passing them from instruments, changing rhythms and that high, soaring voice that jumps sometimes into the semi-spoken. The album is packed with magical moments like this, all the way to closer The Walls, originally penned for Eisenberg’s free-jazz trio Darlin mixes brush-drum free jazz with chamber pop: “I wondered, when I was younger / If I would feel this way forever/ Or if this world would finally settle into something solid / I want to be acknowledged … If rootless in this half-guarded impulse / I cannot find the walls / I trust that that’s a good thing / Sometimes I’ll need convincing.”
Full of wonder, joy, exploration, restless invention, and acoustic beauty, this is truly an exquisite release that immediately becomes an album of the year contender. Out on Joyful Noise Recordings.
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