Experimental guitar improviser Bill Orcutt’s Music for Four Guitars album, where he wrote and tracked four spiky guitar parts for each song, was pretty damn successful and spawned several live Bill Orcutt Quartet tours, with Ava Mendoza, Wendy Eisenberg and Shane Parish completing the band. In a shift in style but still somehow vaguely in keeping with the Four Guitars album comes How to Rescue Things, which sees Bill playing his four-string Telecaster over recordings of old RCA easy listening music, a sound drenched in strings and harps. So yes, although Bill cheekily but correctly keeps the credits to simply ‘Bill Orcutt: guitar’ on the album’s reverse, this is his orchestral strings album, a move that could be tongue in cheek or passion project; tricky to figure out with this mercurial, humorous musician.
With the lush background of harp, strings and choir singing, for the most part here Bill’s playing is restrained, with undulating rhythms fading out with the leisurely pace of the accompaniments. But make no mistake, this is still Bill Orcutt, and although he often resists going full pelt into his guitar strings, he flirts with the idea, reminding us that he still has plenty of fire in his fingers. Take the title track; the opening strings line itself has a bit more muscle and Bill turns his amp up to match it, all but drowning out the low choir and letting loose with some complex flat picking and chord playing before the rich vocals come back in with an ambiguous ‘Amen’ at the end. Is Bill’s music part of the thanks given, or is it for the sudden quiet? Just joking, this album actually contains some of Bill’s sweetest and most sympathetic playing, and although Tom Carter mentions in the album’s notes about the freedom of not having to imply a tune (because of the backing music), there is plenty of melody running through this work, with that freedom present when Bill slips out into abstract wandering. Unlike the relative strictness of his songbook album A History of Every One or the tightly composed Music for Four Guitars, How to Rescue Things exudes this freedom. Listen to the loose nature of the guitar playing on Requiem in Dust, which uses romantic strings and choir backing to counterbalance Bill’s sharply picked notes, often coming from way down the fretboard and using repetition to raise the chin. Because what would Bill’s music be without that sense of challenge?
How to Rescue Things (Palilalia PAL-079)
Bandcamp: https://billorcutt.bandcamp.com/album/how-to-rescue-things