(2021) Jeremiah Fraites - Piano Piano


Review:
After 15 years of belting out hearty folk-rock refrains to increasingly large audiences, Lumineers co-founder Jeremiah Fraites makes a surprisingly subtle solo debut with Piano Piano, a collection of tranquil piano instrumentals that occasionally veers into the avant-garde / quasi-classical wilderness. Like so many acts in 2020, the Lumineers’ touring plans were waylaid by the COVID-19 pandemic, and Fraites — recently transplanted to his wife’s hometown of Turin, Italy — found himself with time to contemplate his long-intended solo album. Sifting through years of musical fragments on phones and hard drives, a collection of melodies began to take shape, all of them played on the piano with little accompaniment. Deeply textured and bearing just the right mix of elegiac grandeur and quiet melancholia, Piano Piano lives in a misty liminal space far from rousing chants of “Ho Hey,” his band’s breakout 2012 hit. Recorded at home amid the everyday sounds of construction, the family dog, and interruptions from his young son, the album’s organic elements are a big part of its overall emotional picture. There’s a dusty sweetness to songs like “Tokyo” and the lovely “Dreams,” with lilting melodies colliding with dissonance and the occasional clunk of foot pedals and hammers on strings. Fraites’ one instrumental indulgence here is the inclusion of a string section, and while Piano Piano would have been a gentle stunner without them, the arrangements are generally understated and more often than not lift the songs up with their ethereal heft. Fraites knows how to tug the heartstrings with a wistful chordal shift, but he flirts with darkness too, painting a very human picture on this excellent debut.





Tracklist:
01 - Departure
02 - Chilly
03 - Tokyo
04 - Maggie
05 - Nearsighted
06 - Dreams
07 - Possessed
08 - An Air That Kills
09 - Simplest of Matters
10 - Pyromaniac
11 - Arrival


Media Report:
Genre: ambient
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits