Scree’s 2023 debut, Jasmine on a Night in July, was one of the year’s most pleasant surprises: a guitar-bass-drums trio doing its best to sound like a big band, aiming for the languid quality of Duke Ellington’s most elegant suites while benefiting from the scrappy intuition honed across many nights playing Brooklyn art spaces like the Owl. On their second album, August, Scree actually are a big band, calling in a cadre of players to fill in the flourishes: strings, horns, woodwinds, even steel guitar that pushes their music toward something like slowed-down Western swing.
The core trio of guitarist Ryan El-Solh, bassist Carmen Quill, and drummer Jason Burger approach their craft less with the ferocity of a surf band than the meticulous ear for arrangements one might associate with the symphonic post-rock extravaganzas of the late ’90s, like Jim O’Rourke’s Bad Timing or Dirty Three’s Horse Stories. While Jasmine worked well because of the way the band pushed and pulled each other in different directions, here their interplay is secondary to the way each steps up to the plate: Quill makes her bass sing on “White Roses” and “My Life Through the Eyes of a Cat,” and Burger, who has played with songwriting legend Rodney Crowell, has a country gentleman’s touch on the drums. There’s often a faint organ trickling at the bottom of the arrangements, like an underground river winding through the album’s subconscious.
This is easy music to like. You could imagine an alternate universe where they supplanted Khruangbin’s exalted position on weed-store playlists, or where they debuted 20 years earlier and scored Little Miss Sunshine in lieu of DeVotchKa. There are moments of free and volcanic playing that suggest Albert Ayler’s big-band séances, especially when the horns work themselves into tangles with El-Solh’s guitar, but the album never devolves into unadulterated skronk. Nor does it fall into the common traps that so often snare latter-day instrumental rockers, the predictable crescendos and stank-faced Dillaisms. You get the sense that they could be a big deal if the right set of ears got to them.
But there’s a dead-serious subtext swimming beneath their music. After the release of Jasmine on a Night in July, El-Solh cited the title’s inspiration in “some of the beautiful things about life in the Arab world” that are currently under threat. The catastrophic loss of cultural heritage in the wake of the Gaza genocide and other conflicts in the Arab world is inextricable from Scree’s music, and it may explain why El-Solh so doggedly pursues an Islamic ideal of beauty, drawing from the work of the beloved Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish on Jasmine and the rhythms of Quranic recitation on August standout “Zikra.”
The potpourri on the cover of August looks good enough to smell. Yet the viewer’s eyes are inevitably drawn toward a looming presence in the center left of the composition: a calligraphic piece El-Solh bought at an art center in a Palestinian refugee camp, etched into a repurposed American-made tear gas canister (“an abundant American import in the West Bank,” as El-Solh noted in an Instagram post). Listening to Scree, you wonder why a band so good and so easy to love hasn’t made a bigger splash. You also suspect El-Solh might be too principled to pursue vibe-band stardom in an industry whose streaming gatekeepers support the same war machine that put the tear gas canister there in the first place.
