Gregory Alan Isakov – Evening Machines
Dualtone Music – 5th October 2018
Pictured on the cover standing in a field on his Colorado farm where he grows market crops and sells vegetable seeds, this is Gregory Alan Isakov’s first album of new material in five years, his last release being an orchestral rework of songs from his previous three albums. Mostly recorded at night, hence the title, it also marks a new path on his musical journey having signed to Dualtone. However, while the hours in which it came together may feed into the atmosphere, the core of the music, engineered by both Tucker Martine and Andrew Berlin, remains very much part of the otherworldly hushed yearning and balance between space and sound he’s made his signature.
It begins on a simple repeated keyboard patterns and echoey, distant vocals with Berth, a song which, written and recorded in a single all-night session and with a phonically ambiguous title, concerns immigration and starting life again in new land, echoing his own experience of arriving in the US from South Africa as a child.
The gently rolling San Luis with its wordless crooned background vocals, percussive shimmers and strummed guitar melody deals with loss and separation as he sings “I’m a ghost to you, you’re a ghost to me” that connected sense of hurt mirrored in the echoingly sung Caves in the lines “did I hear something break, was that your heart or my heart?” There are broken hearts too as he waltzes through the strings-pulsing Southern Star, the song apparently taking shape at a poetry retreat and involving words cut up from a page, each from a sci-fi and a romance paperback.
Based around heavy piano notes and reverberating drums, like Caves, Powder is one of the relatively more muscular tracks while, by contrast, Was I Just Another One has more of a drone setting, ghostly pedal steel underscoring the semi-spoken lyrics.
His words can, at times, be deeply romantic, the simply strummed, lyrically pithy Chemicals with its falsetto sung title sporting the line “you saw her bathing in the creek, now you’re jealous of the water.”
Moving into the final stretch, coloured by beautifully simple banjo and a repeated percussive design, in the lyrically free-associating Dark, Dark, Dark, with its vague hints of The Band, the elusive radio queen object of his longing, all smoke, all nicotine, causes the songs in his pocket to “just crumble apart.”
The slow waltzing, dusk falling shades give Too Far Away an almost Cohenesque hymnal quality to its longing as it gathers to its chorale peak before ebbing away into the ether with the poetic image of “the galvanized moon and her rings in the rain.”
The vocals treated to create a ghostly echo mirroring the haunted instrumentation, the slow, disoriented and faltering shuffle of Where You Gonna Go gives way to the final track, Wings In All Black, a deeply personal song about being resilient in the face of loss delivered over a repeated acoustic guitar shrug intercut with piano, reverb electric flourish and half-formed whistle before ebbing away on a repeated refrain of being “down, down, down”.
Listening to Electric Machines has been described as being enfolded in a comfortable solitude; settle down and enjoy the glow and the hum.
Evening Machines is out today (5th October). Order via Amazon.