Tyondai Braxton has been making music, patiently and maybe a bit pensively, in New York for most of the past decade, both in the ecstatic prog-rock band Battles and as an occasional loop-mining solo artist who can summon the sound of several bands over. None of his music has been small, and none of it has lacked for promise. But none of it even began to foretell the scale and sweep of Central Market.
Central Market is a big album for an age that has acquainted itself with thinking small about the album both as a vessel for sound and as a standard-bearer for new aesthetic vision. It's big in the sense that it's orchestral-- made in part with the Wordless Music Orchestra, a rangy New York ensemble proficient with everything from strings and xylophones to flutes and kazoos. But Central Market proves bigger in the sense that it's clearly been delivered as a statement record-- a summation of lots of ideas accrued over the years and lots of restless thinking about how best to engage those ideas in ways far from expected.
Braxton came up around the start of the 2000s in the same underground folds that fostered Black Dice and Animal Collective. He wrote music that shared certain rustle-y, ritualistic traits with the early work of both, but Braxton was also more expressive from the start. Especially at startling (and all too rare) live shows that would find him sitting solo on a floor with a mess of effects and a microphone, he would layer loops upon loops of guitar sounds with vocals that he would bellow-- like some strange fusion of formless noise-music with the pent-up goth squirm of Morrissey or Robert Smith.
Vocals of the sort don't wander often into Central Market, but the emotive tilt of them figures into arrangements that address many shades of meaning and mood. "Opening Bell" begins it all with an expectant piano trill that builds as it couples with gamely whistling, dark electric guitar, and golden horns, all before spreading into a bright fantasia of strings played within the deep space of the most accomplished classical music. Braxton has a conservatory background and, maybe more importantly, a well-thumbed copy of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Indeed, echoes of that book-- a suggestive survey of modern classical music by storied New Yorker critic Alex Ross-- linger in scores that evoke the studiousness and sonic spread of composers like Igor Stravinsky, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti, and many others who addressed both the state of the world and the very idea of "music" at its semiotic core.
Not that stoking seriousness is Central Market's sole province. Some of the barely recognizable vocalese in tracks like "Uffe's Woodshop" plays like the kind of almost goofy voice-pitch games that Braxton has played in Battles, a band he's helped rescue from what could otherwise be a mere triumph of rock technicians. And the ways that slide whistles and kazoos dance around portentous guitar in a track like "The Duck and the Butcher" make much of their sourcing from, well, slide whistles and kazoos.
Some of the album is experimental and sly, but most of Central Market is searchingly big and magnanimous. The centerpiece, "Platinum Rows", flits through stately reserve and composed chaos over 10-plus minutes, given to deep drama and comic celebration that thrive as both for not really showing their cards as either. And as the mood constricts and descends into darkness toward the end-- especially in the guitar/vocal-based "J. City", the only song that could be classed as rock at all-- Braxton stumps well for an internal logic at play from the beginning. How that logic manifests itself throughout can prove stunning at times and a bit scattered at others-- but it's always, in ways that count as an important achievement in the end, a galvanizing surprise.
