Kevin Coleman – Imaginary Conversations (2024)        


Review:
Kevin Coleman’s guitar playing occupies the fertile land between a melodic strain of American primitivism and the abstractions of contemporary guitar composition. This makes for an interesting proposition, the results of which play out over the 7-and-a-half minutes of Imaginary Conversations’ opening track, ‘Mammut Americanum’. At first glance, it’s dancefloor-ready, country-tinged folk with Jack Dungan’s flighty but resonant fiddle taking a prominent role. But the deeper you listen, the more complexities become apparent, and it’s not long before you realise that Coleman is a daring, accomplished composer and a musician of great skill and versatility. The tune has a kind of pause for breath at the midway point, after which the instrumentation thickens, the melody unspools, and vivid tones of psychedelia and freak folk begin to seep in with the earthy buzz of a jaw harp. Coleman started his musical life in a dreampop band, and while little of that genre carries over into his current musical guise, it’s possible that his knack for a satisfying song structure can be traced back to his poppier days. Mammut Americanum is the shortest of the three tracks by some margin, but even on the two longer compositions there is an admirable level of control, a seemingly innate knowledge of when to change the direction and the overall feel of the piece. Coleman never lets it go stale. Truckers to Pulaski begins with gentle fingerpicking before moving into jumpier, stompier, toe-tapping territory. Jazzy elements begin to creep in, not unlike Bert Jansch. The overall sound here sits between the impressionistic and the abstract, and is strongly inspired by the natural world: there is a lot of the American landscape in these tunes, but it is filtered through human thought structures into the multilayered musical narratives that the fingerpicked guitar seems uniquely suited to. Truckers to Pulaski’s quietly dramatic final section is one of the most beautiful parts of the album, a perfect marriage of restraint and technique. The last and longest track, Imaginary Conversations on Fish Hatchery Road, is where Coleman delves furthest into old weird America, and where the synths, played by Trevor Nikrant, have their most prominent role. It begins with a rising, chiming guitar refrain, which quickly gives way to an unexpected drumbeat. From there, it sprawls outwards into the realm of cosmic country. Imagine one of Wilco’s krautrock experiments, shorn of the vocals and stretched out to nearly twenty minutes, or John Fahey using Tangerine Dream as a backing band, and you might be getting close. The sheer expansiveness is mindblowing, but so is the attention to the small, human details in the music. There is a synth-heavy middle section, which is almost Steve Reich-esque in its use of minimalism and near-repetitions, and then there is a kind of breakdown, where discordance and drone hold sway for a few minutes before a final moment of clarity when the plucked strings kick back in. It may contain only three tracks, but Imaginary Conversations is one of the most varied albums of the year so far, moving in all sorts of unexpected directions and full of satisfying shifts and conclusions. If Coleman is interested in opening up new pathways for guitar music, he is certainly going about it the right way. This is a sweeping and stunningly accomplished album, brimming with ideas, and it offers a glimpse into multiple potential futures for American folk music. — klofmag.com


   


Track List:
01 - Mammut Americanum
02 - Truckers to Pulaski
03 - Imaginary Conversations on Fish Hatchery Road


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk
Origin: Nashville, Tennessee, 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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