Nicholas Krgovich and Joseph Shabason’s shared musical journey began in 2020 when, along with Chris Harris, they released Philadelphia, one of that year’s best and most highly acclaimed albums. In the six years since, the pair have joined forces with a series of other notable collaborators, including M. Sage and, most recently, Japanese avant-pop heroes Tenniscoats. Four Days in June, though a Shabason and Krogovich album by name, sees the pair enlist a wide range of musicians, including fiddle and banjo player Sam Amidon, guitarist Thom Gill, bassist/keyboardist Bram Gielen and drummer Phil Melanson. Krgovich sings and writes the lyrics, while Shabason plays synth, piano, sax and flute. The result is an album of subtle, often delicate layers, borrowing from country, sophisticated AOR, laid-back jazz and chamber-pop.
The songs on Four Days in June are slightly less structurally loose than those on Philadelphia or 2022’s At Scaramouche. Occasionally, they coalesce into chorus-like repetitions (the woodpecker section of Along the Dance Away). Field Mouse is, melodically speaking, barely there at all: imagistic lyrics float over soft-edged drones and cymbal splashes and a wandering bassline. By comparison, Midday Sun is a bop, with its bouncy rhythms and its cheeky Talking Heads references. Some fluid guitar licks give it a subtle alt-country vibe, something that continues in Road with its unexpected, skipping banjo licks.
But for the most part, this is music that settles on you gently, sometimes like a fine rain or sometimes like dust. These are songs that patiently take stock as their creators slip into middle age. Rather than raging against the dying of the light, they go gentle into the early afternoon, accepting the passage of time with an almost zen-like sense of calm. In musical terms, this means that Shabason and Krgovich’s patented combination of jazz-inflected pop and dreamy adult contemporary still underpins everything here. The variation is in the detail: the combination of dry beats and impressionistic dabs of pedal steel on Bopping Along, the way No. Two builds slowly from a handful of disparate creaks into a rambling, discursive melody, the skittering electronica of 43, which recalls Brit luminaries Kieran Hebden or Aphex Twin repackaged for US soft-rock radio.
A lightly distorted guitar rubs up against clear, bright pedal steel on Little Wind, providing an undercurrent of barely discernible tension. It holds Krgovich’s half-whispered poem-song aloft, allowing just enough magic to seep out of the mundane. Dry Corner, penned by Palberta’s Anina Ivry-Block, is like a college radio staple heard through thick curtains, dreamy and woozy but blessed with a surprising melodic bite.
Four Days in June’s key statements are its first and last tracks. Seven-minute opener, Begin Again, kicks things off in typically minimalist form with a flighty but low-key instrumental section that nods to chamber-pop and jazz, before Krgovich begins a narrative that takes in fruit flies, the neighbour’s baby and the quiet beauty of sunlight between trees, all in the service of recognising the importance of the little things. Last year’s Tenniscoats collaboration took delight in small details and new friendships, and it seems Krgovich has taken those themes to heart. The album finishes with Time of Your Life, a song based on the melody of Bridget St. John’s I Don’t Know If I Can Take It. Over an arrangement thick with shimmering organ, pedal steel and fiddle, Krgovich casts bittersweet glances at the lives of his acquaintances while himself remaining on the outside, a candid observer. Domesticity observed with care and intelligence and fashioned into alluring melodies has become the hallmark of Shabason and Krgovich, and Four Days in June is another example of their deceptively light, wholly profound art.
Four Days in June (June 12th, 2026), Ideé Fixe Records