By: Helen Armfield
Eric Bachmann | website | facebook | twitter | soundcloud |
Released on March 25, 2016 via Merge Records
As the final round up of his (solo) project Crooked Fingers, this eponymous album is quite a departure from his previous, harder, style with group Archers Loaf. Clad in the regularity of tone and 12 bar patterns of contemporary soft-rock/blues, Eric Bachmann’s lyrics transmit a darkness that would not be out of place in an episode of MASH. It calls on the tropes of the american regional psyches one-by-one, and uses each to show the underbelly of modern american life.
Much use is made of progressive chords (most often on piano), with his smooth tenor laid over; it carries the timelessness of the back line, keeping a consistent feel throughout, and means that the album works in play as individual tracks, or on shuffle. ‘Small Talk’ contains a myriad of small motet, so the song title, lyrics and tonality, reflect & emphasise each other; ‘Carolina’ could be about a person, but becomes more about the relationship between the touring musician and the landscape they (inevitably) pass through.
“My wandering lifestyle has presented only one nugget of clarity in my life: that places do not offer a sense of home for me. People do,” says Bachmann, in the publicity, “I believe that much of the chronic loneliness and fear that plagues our species stems from the probability that whatever creative force set all of this into motion is indifferent to us.”
As an expression of these lofty ambitions, the album falls a little short. But its good travelling music, has grown on me with a month of on/off listening, and screams hugely in his favour as an expression of a lifetimes growth in music. As in ‘Mercy’, with the kick drum opener, and the california choral backing, it’s an everything album that speaks to each of us somewhere, that subverts the tropes, and sets Bachmann up with a Cash-like career album to take into his future. I’m excited to see what he might do next.
