So you own a guitar and live in the greater Bay Area. Great, ok, let's get you started. Basically, here are your two options: You can plug that into something (keep it cheap) and warble angrily. Or, you can go acoustic and warble gently. Some people around here, like David Novick, even do both. As a member of San Francisco Water Cooler, he plays abraded, candy-colored garage rock. But last October, he slipped 100 copies of this little self-titled record into the world, under an imprint called Sun Sneeze. It was a small psych-folk Valentine, an ant's cough in the vast universe; recorded on four and eight-track, it was so muffled it barely seemed to exist. But it radiated a strange, beatific energy, the kind that is supposed to be native to this little patch of lysergic territory Novick's tilling, but is often missing. Novick, clearing his throat somewhat, is reissuing it, on the slightly-less-tiny God? imprint, a subsidiary of Drag City. Maybe twice as many people will hear it this time.
In any case, those trying will have to lean forward slightly. The sound is so muffled it appears that it was accidentally recorded in a back-pocket iPhone rather than captured with any degree of intention. Novick's vocals on "Undo the Knot" sound like a hesitant early take, done while he was still negotiating how the phases matched up with the changes. Nope; that's it.
This home recording technique usually tricks us into hearing amateurism—it's an aesthetic, sure, but it's also a handy way to camouflage actual chops. But Novick's guitar playing, emerging from beneath the sonic horse blanket, is inventive, fluid, and often beautiful. The instrumental "Silver" builds in layers, adding every eight to 16 bars to its complicated base chord progression, blooming into a gently smudged guitar lead. Despite the sketchy sound and brevity (it's over in less than two minutes), it's one of the most memorable melodies on the album. Even when he's just relaxing in a glimmering pool of reverb, like on the little murmuring instrumental ditty "Ashtray", you can hear his fingers thinking.
David Novick runs seven songs and less than a half hour, a quickly dissipating smoke ring that you are just getting a whiff of by the time it passes. Novick seems like a devotee of the late-60s British folk underground, the kind of dazed, wispy weirdness that piled up on loving comps like Gather in the Mushrooms. There is plenty of precedent for what Novick is doing right now, too; You can hear hints of White Fence's gentle surrealism and Kinks love in "Undo The Knot", some of Jessica Pratt's pastoral stillness in the becalmed "Rain." But Novick stands out even in a glut. Underneath the haze, you get a hint of the cosmic thoughts floating through his mind: "We are as much of a mystery to Death as God is to us," he sings on "Undo the Knot". It’s barely audible, but it commands you to lean forward to catch more.
