Rootless - Other Reasons (2023)      


Review:
Rootless is the Brooklyn-based guitarist Jeremy Hurewitz caught here emerging from his guitarist chrysalis. In Other Reasons, the jangle of guitar comes as if from a distant time or place, wrapped in an amber-y, ambient glow and shot through with vocals that are both disembodied and curiously soulful. “Feet of Clay” has faint echoes of Six Organs’ Companion Rises, that alchemical blend of forthright picking and gnostic bliss. It is filled out with spectral swoops of violin (that’s Zachary Paul a composer and improviser from Brooklyn) and haunted with the sweet trill of female vocals (Ash Brooks, who often works with Matt Lajoie). Lajoie himself turns up in “Half Truths,” a luminous interweaving of clear, pure tone, where tremulous guitar vibrations skate over wavering tone washes like a long-legged water bug crossing the pond. There’s turbulence within the calm, a muted scream, a rumble of dread, a massive noisy crescendo, but it resolves in steady strum and breathy vocals. Think Hush Arbors emerging from a whorl of John Bence. Side two leans more towards acoustic blues folk, letting the mystery arise from simpler, more familiar parts. It starts with “Who Am I?” with its upward slanting picked line and its whispery sung melody.  A patter of hand drums picks up the rhythm after a bit, and a violin slips between the notes in a vibrato-laced lament. It is, perhaps, the most folk-song-ish entry on this five-song cassette but slowed to a meditative pace and distilled to essence. “What Was Once Will Be Again” is likewise mostly acoustic picking without the whoosh of ambient sound or the flutter of spectral vocals. And yet though these songs are made of plainer material, they are just as evocative and stirring. Hurewitz’s previous albums have focused more on fingerpicking, agile and shaded with blues, folk and non-Western influences. His What the Truth Leaves Out from 2022 may put you in mind of Sir Richard Bishop. But Other Reasons is another thing altogether, wholly its own experience and worth having. — By Jennifer Kelly at dusted


   


Track List:
01 - Other Reasons
02 - Feet of Clay
03 - Half Truths
04 - Who Am I
05 - What Once Was Will Be Again


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, ambient
Country: Brooklyn, New York, USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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