For a decade, the songs of peripatetic guitarist and singer Ilyas Ahmed have been mistaken for atmospheres. Recorded in a cloud of echo and shrouded by the distortion endemic to lo-fi equipment, Ahmed’s pieces used to feel distant, transmitted from some faraway plane and warped en route. Though "Black Midas", from his excellent 2005 debut, was a gorgeous duet for piano and guitar, the recording added enough ghostly essence for the result to imply witchcraft. At its core, "Stained Sky", from his 2012 debut for Immune Recordings, was a chugging power ballad, but with the chords overloading the microphone and Ahmed’s voice interred by static, it became otherworldly, less a hit than a haze. "The term singer-songwriter generally conjures up negative connotations," he once told Tiny Mix Tapes. "I do consider what I do to be songs for sure, although my definition of songs might be different than others’."
Ahmed’s new album and second for Immune, I Am All Your Own, might shrink that divide. Many of these eight songs are some of his most lucid and communicative, pushing the tunes beyond their surrounding textures. During "The Last Laugh", he repeats a short, beautiful phrase on electric guitar and sings softly above it, his harmonies out of time in a way that recalls the narcotic phasing of Elliott Smith’s early records. Room noises and equipment hums populate the background. But at last, the song—a bittersweet ode to a dying relationship—feels central, not just a vestige of the process. "All You Say" is another big Ahmed ballad, with heavy, slow strums of a few easy themes. The music wobbles, as if the tape machine were unsteady, but Ahmed takes care to play softly enough for the rendering to remain clear. Even when an electric guitar roars in for the second half, Ahmed tucks it just beneath the vocals and acoustic, letting it accent and illustrate his emotional disappointment without overwhelming it.
The adjustment seems incremental for Ahmed, a matter of moving a few knobs and adjusting some microphones. But the effect is revelatory. Ahmed has often collaborated and toured with Grouper’s Liz Harris, and his shift here recalls the move Harris made for last year’s Ruins, stepping from beneath the din and drone to play plaintive confessionals at the piano. So it goes with I Am All Your Own: Ahmed’s voice has never seemed so approachable and assured.
Perhaps because the heartsickness of these songs was too profound to hide, Ahmed seems newly compelled to connect. For all of its intricacy, Ahmed’s music never felt vulnerable so much as exploratory. On I Am All Your Own, he seems to have experimented enough to know that his structures and sentiments are strong enough to support themselves. "I Need to Fix My Body So I Can Light My Mind on Fire Again" is a tender, frank lament about how our neuroses disrupt important relationships. Picking a 12-string and tapping a tambourine, his slight falsetto breaking just above the riff, he produces something like a Toad the Wet Sprocket or Goo Goo Dolls hit from an alternate universe, a place that Ahmed once seemed embarrassed to admit he even visited.
I Am All Your Own does reduce the once-beguiling mystery of Ahmed’s music. What you hear with these numbers is mostly what you get, with surface noise and sonic mess to penetrate. Some may find that the new transparency makes his work a bit pedestrian, the work of another guy with a guitar and a few chords sharing simple sadness. But Ahmed’s senses of song and arrangement remain highly idiosyncratic, where verses spill into choruses and solos in unpredictable fashion. Listening back to Ahmed’s early work, that has always been the case, but he’s finally resolved to let us in on his secret.
