By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring the brilliant slow motion ambient country of Barry Walker Jr.’s PALEO SOL and cool-as-fuck art punk of Sunday Mourners’ A-RHYTHM ABSOLUTE!
Barry Walker Jr. – PALEO SOL
Genre: Ambient Country, Folk
Favorite Tracks: “Peridot, Call Me,” “Leaving Lower Big Basin”
Be it Jeffrey Silverstein or North Americans or Rose City Band, the world of Barry Walker Jr. has been covered by this magazine plenty. But his excellent and wide-ranging solo material has never been explicitly written about—an oversight. His latest, PALEO SOL, finds the pedal steel player at multiple uniquely timed and accessible crossroads—both personally and within the culture.
A collaboration with drummer Rob Smith (Animal, Surrender!, Gray/Smith) and bassist Jason Willmon (Mouth Painter, Fruited Planes), the album arrives as pedal steel playing is having its most mainstream moment in many years (see: the Wednesdays and MJ Lendermans of the world). PALEO SOL makes the most of this moment—an ambient instrumental album that acts as a proper sendup of both the instrument and Walker’s talents. There’s a slow-motion gallop to the best songs here, be it weightless meditations like “Peridot, Call Me” or magic-hour climbs like “Leaving Lower Big Basin,” both smoothing the wigged-out experimenting found on his last studio album, 2020’s SHOULDA ZENITH.
But the album also comes at a time of personal evolution, composed during the birth of Walker’s first child. Indeed, there is a wide-eyed, slowed-down grace to these songs, exploring time through these uniquely cooing reverberations. The opening tracks, “Quiessence” and “Son, Don’t Brighten The Bear Creek Rhyolite” are glacial giants, Walker’s playing dizzying but sedative at times. He took inspiration “from lullabies, twilight, and new life blossoming,” and that renewed quiet energy is palpable. “Sentiment Lithosphere,” the album’s 12-minute penultimate song, communicates PALEO SOL best: a curious, cinematic crawl that’s basking in whatever warmth can be found. If Walker’s previous material leaned more playful, this leans more peaceful, and in context that’s a beautiful place to land. You can hear it over on Bandcamp!
Sunday Mourners – A-RHYTHM ABSOLUTE
Genre: Art Punk, Post-Punk
Favorite Tracks: “Careers In Acting,” “Biograph,” “Darling”
The third track on Sunday Mourners’ excellent A-RHYTHM ABSOLUTE is a 12-minute noise rock jam that opens with some early Modest Mouse guitar picking and closes with a collapsing, shaking rhythm section that would make Ira Kaplan blush. Like much of the Los Angeles band’s debut, it’s awkwardly angular and excitable—endearingly so.
A-RHYTHM ABSOLUTE feels combustible in the way the best art punk albums do. The band will draw obvious comparisons to Parquet Courts, especially since Quinn Robinson’s vocals capture a similarly wry fluidness to that of Andrew Savage. Like that band, there is something effortlessly cool and incendiary about the music here. Opener “Careers In Acting” is this wiry freak-out, with the band’s voguish strut turning into an industrial guitar duel as Robinson’s performance boils over from collected to crazed. The urgent “Phantom Affair” similarly works itself into a frenzy, the guitar playing a sounding alarm the longer the song goes on. Through it all, Sunday Mourners are writing pop songs; the rhythm section here is often the MVP of the album, that forward bass tone and downhill drumming tying together Robinson’s sunglasses indoors energy. These driving, hooky rock songs, like “Unwitting Boy” or “Biograph,” define a great punk album. You can grab a copy over on Bandcamp.
Comments