Anyone straining to keep up with the career of Joel Ford is given a welcome opportunity to get entangled in his various musical impulses on Trust. Ford is best known as one half of Ford & Lopatin, a duo who managed to find an awkward kind of parity in bulbous funk tracks, 1980s cheese-rock, retro-futurist pop, and the methadone gleam of new age. His work additionally extends to a part as bassist in Brooklyn soft-rock outfit Tigercity, and to his solo project Airbird. The latter gained notice for the "City vs Mountains" single in 2011, the title of which acted as a literalist representation of Ford's residential rotation between New York City and North Carolina. It was his most overt pop move since the excellent 2010 single "Strawberry Skies", released under the proto-Ford & Lopatin moniker Games. But Trust edges away from repetition, dipping out of outright pop and looping back around to encompass all the other influences winding through his brain.
What's impressive with this release, as with most things Ford touches, is his hypercritical attention to detail. It's full of fussy little touches that don't necessarily become apparent until you're six or seven plays in. It separates Ford from the dwindling underground of 80s acolytes who are happy to lean hard on the slap-bass preset on their Yamaha keyboard and let the guffaws roll right in. Trust finds inspiration from those sounds and takes them to a tender place, providing the much-needed comedown from the souped-up Prince-isms of tracks like "Too Much MIDI (Please Forgive Me)" from Channel Pressure. Sometimes it's a little too easy to play spot-the-influence with Ford's various projects, and Airbird is no different. On the surface this EP could easily be dismissed as a series of pointless genre-hopping exercises, but most of the material here falls into a logical cohesion, representing a leap toward the future instead of a simple grab bag of sounds from the past.
The decade that Ford just can't let go is still fully represented, although often in unexpected ways. "Royal" is built around the kind of skeletal electro framework Kurtis Mantronik was busy assembling circa 1985-86, full of echoing handclaps and sparsely blinking synth lines. By the time this five-track EP gets to its penultimate track, the brooding "Goodnight", Ford is channeling the desolate work of the Blue Nile circa A Walk Across the Rooftops. He never reaches the same highs and intentional lows of either Mantronix or the Blue Nile, but it highlights an upswing in ambition, a sense that Ford isn't content to be simply remembered for playing a part in the indie underground's sudden disposition for old Harold Faltermeyer singles at the start of this decade.
That widening of the scope of what Ford could achieve with his music also surfaces in Jeff Gitelman's soaring David McAlmont-style vocal wails on the glistening, Thundercat-like title track, and it's there again in the soft Rhodes-y piano stabs that bed down the eerie new age-isms of "Deep Dreams, Inc". The latter resembles a placid take on the kind of world that Kuedo's Severant inhabited in 2011, with both records feeling like lost sci-fi soundtracks looking for appropriate visual counterparts. It's a picture partially completed by the cover art of Trust, which resembles a Photek release circa Modus Operandi, or something belonging to Graham Sutton's experimental drum and bass outfit Boymerang. Both Photek and Sutton purposefully hurtle headlong into the future with their music, and while Trust often feels firmly anchored to the past, there's enough here to suggest that Ford is doing some future gazing of his own.
