David Grubbs started out in Squirrel Bait, the linchpin of a Louisville indie scene that soon after would introduce such staples as Slint and Will Oldham. But since that auspicious debut, Grubbs has spent most of his time racing away from his punk roots as fast as possible, most prominently in Gastr del Sol (particularly in partnership with Jim O'Rourke) and later through a number of idiosyncratic, sometimes inscrutable solo records. Talk about post-rock: objects in Grubbs' rearview are receding so fast, they're barely a blip.
Grubbs' solo discs have touched on genres like folk and country, but mostly as subjects for subtle deconstruction. In fact, "Gethsemani Night", the first track off of An Optimist Notes the Dusk, Grubbs' first solo album in four years, could pass for folk were it not for his trademark use of space, pauses, dissonance, and unpredictable sing-song melodies. Then again, maybe it is folk despite this, just folk dissected while looking through the wrong end of the microscope. Certainly there's a bucolic feel to the track, and while Nate Wooley's trumpet as often as not sounds like a scratched string instrument rather than a horn, it may as well be the wind blowing outside the window on a particularly blustery day.
This open, airy theme continues through even the most insular tracks. Like "An Optimist Declines", which features two free guitar/drum duets sandwiching a menacing low-end drone, like the light at both ends of a tunnel, as Grubbs offers enigmatic lyrics describing "smoke edged with glass, backlit." With "Holy Fool Music", however, his pastoral reverie veers radically to rock, albeit rock infused with momentum-subverting tricks along with the occasional big riffs and drum rolls. Even then, the song ends back in the ether, the pensive transition to the instrumental "Storm Sequence", whose title may reference a day in the studio when (per the liner notes) the temperature "hit a record 105 degrees before thunderstorms came, turned the sky green, and thrashed the cornfields."
See what a little bit of direct language can do? Grubbs' compulsive poetic obfuscation makes for fine capital-A Art, but its inherent pretentiousness hurts "Eyeglasses of Kentucky", apparently an elliptical Ambrose Bierce paraphrasing tribute to Lexington photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard that would have benefited from a more direct bent. "Here's a photo of a house/ An embarrassing semblance of face," Grubbs sings, adding little to the mood of the track beyond enigmatic distraction and further abstraction.
In the press notes Grubbs calls the album, somewhat glibly, "a step into the void," and with "The Not-So-Distant", the void finally arrives in full force. Or maybe full lack-of-force is more accurate, as for nearly 12 minutes the track hums, ebbs, and (sort of) flows, a menacing vampire-morning sunrise that unfolds like a slow explosion erasing everything from the horizon. It's scary because it's so simple and spare, a quietly cresting and falling apocalypse that soothes the crap out of you. Or maybe it's just some avant-garde term-paper bullshit dreamed up in the exact duration it took to record. The optimist, however, would note such a perspective doesn't alter the track's creepy effectiveness, even as, in one gradual sweep, it makes you instantly forget nearly everything that came before it, until it, too, disappears.
