Steven R. Smith – Olive (2024)              


Review:
If you follow Steven R. Smith’s music, it’s always tempting to draw inferences from the name on the record’s sleeve. He’s recorded under a series of guises (Ulaan Kohl, Hala Strana, Ulaan Markhor), and the name often suggests a particular angle on his long-standing practice of making music at home that makes your mind take a trip. But the divisions are starting to blur. While Olive was made under his own name, its toolkit corresponds closely to the one he used on Ulaan Passerine’s Dawn. On both, his organ contests with his electric guitar for dominance, and the drums tend to be well down in the mix. And on both, he uses horn section sourced from sympathetic corners scattered around the world. In fact, it’s mostly the same players on both records. But if the tools are the same, the question presents, how is he using them? The paradox of Olive is that while Smith is an auteur whose sound is pretty identifiable from project to project, and that does not change on this recording, it admits an unusual degree of outside input. Not only does it feature a couple of keyboards and six reed and brass instruments contributed by players scattered across Europe and the USA; they’re often at the center of the action. “Across the Boulevard” gets its payoff from the way João Sousa’s bold trumpet yields to Yvonne Sone’s diffusing organ. Likewise, on “Passing Winter,” it’s the transition from Filippo Tramontana’s laconic French horn to Kate Wright’s (yes, of Movietone) piano and field recordings that’ll activate private cinematic visions. While Smith gets some cool licks in, such as the organ line that stretches across brassy harmonies on “Trees at North Branch,” the focus is on arrangements that he might have devised, but could not play on his own. His ability to make you imagine a world is undimmed, but now he’s letting representatives from around the world add finishing touches. — dusted


   


Track List:
01 - Marshland Study
02 - The Magpie
03 - On the Trellis
04 - With Cypresses
05 - Passing Winter
06 - Across the Boulevard
07 - Olive
08 - Parlor Fields
09 - Trees at North Branch
10 - Roadmenders


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, ambient, post-rock
Origin: 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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