Fulton Lights is a dark, intensely serious and brooding record, one seemingly composed alone in the back of a taxi as it coursed through Brooklyn side streets after a long, long night. Throughout, Andrew Spencer Goldman projects his frustrations-- from the perceived inadequacies of American capitalism and media industries to personal feelings of self-doubt over missed opportunities-- onto the expansive canvas of the cityscape, the record's inspiration and focus. The inner-cover album art explains nicely the tone of the record, along with its clearly-stated conceptual ambition: A silhouetted man walks alone on a streetlamp-lit urban street, the main swatch of color an American flag tacked to a chain link fence.
A multi-instrumentalist himself, Goldman recruited a broad cast of contributors for Lights; the liner notes list violin, viola, cello, trombone, upright bass, Rhodes organ, vibraphone, and turntables among the instrumentation. But the most fitting term in the credits is the most open-ended one: "programming." Though only listed on a few songs, this general descriptor seems to be the M.O. of Lights on the whole. The record apparently took over three years to complete, and every detail feels appropriately slaved over, from the placement of plaintive, echo-laden piano notes to the slowly rising and falling background guitar washes. For a collection of songs seemingly designed to be soulful and evocative, a vibe of careful calculation pervades the record, which never moves past the pace of a slow, pensive 3am stroll.
Goldman's lyrics and vocal delivery are, to a fault, the record's most carefully plotted component. On the unfortunately-titled opener "Thank God for the Evening News", he seems determined to leave nothing to the listener's imagination, relying on heavy-handed sarcastic sloganeering that, perhaps accidentally, echoes the city's plentiful angst-ridden coffee shop poetry. Over a dated trip-hop beat courtesy of Dälek's Oktopus, Goldman rails against the media machine: "But you can't believe everything you hear/ And you can't believe everything you see/ Like White House press conferences/ About freedom and democracy". He ends with "And thank God for Wall Street," a fitting broadside to conclude a song that attempts to tackle so much. Goldman's high-register folky weep of a voice-- a slightly darker Sufjan Stevens-- reflects well the emotional tenor of "Evening News" and Fulton Lights on the whole: impassioned, sentimental balladry with no shortage of symbolism.
While Goldman's clunky polemicizing proves, to his credit, to be a false omen for the remainder of Lights, his passion holds true throughout and continually threatens to lapse into full-on schmaltz. Thematically, Lights progresses through a song cycle that begins with urban alienation and paranoia ("1,000 Little Eyes", "The Sound of the City"), the unceasing passage of time (lyrics include "Time is the monkey on our backs" and "Here's to bad memories/ May they fade"), and finally to a quietly hopeful epilogue ("Breathe In, Breathe Out") that finds comfort in metropolitan surroundings by adhering to the titular recommendation. It's only a slight respite, however, from the often overwhelming, stilted sense of despair and longing that pervades Fulton Lights. The record is an extended therapy session that succeeds mainly by creating an intense longing for the warm morning light.
