In recent years, Oakland-based singer/songwriter and one-man indie rock chamber orchestra William Ryan Fritch has been recording more music than your favorite mixtape rapper. Last spring, he began releasing a collection of 110+ songs in a fashion that is as decadent as the contained music itself: through an ongoing subscription service. Revisionist is intended as the culmination of the series, and high rollers receive it on 140-gram vinyl inside a book of paintings. The ballads that make up the album are equal parts melancholic, Americana-flavored pop and percolating, post-minimalist chamber music. The action is staged in the kind of cathedral-sized space simulated on defining mid-'00s indie rock records like Beirut’s Gulag Orkestar or Grizzly Bear’s Yellow House; indeed, Fritch’s album could have reasonably been made during this period.
Fritch’s chief musical preoccupation is dissonance—not in regards to notes and harmonies, but to quality of sound. Much as synth devotees painstakingly shape sine waves, Fritch shapes "unruly" acoustic source material with a bevy of effects before putting the sounds to work as building blocks. Churning figures for string orchestra, rolling piano chords, and pealing electric guitar leads provide warm centers to sonic landscapes strewn with junkyard-snare hits and amplified pedal noise. While piecing these together, Fritch seems to visualize structure horizontally rather than vertically, preferring to let layered lines loose to combine and complicate each other over time, rather than focus on carefully building individual moments in succession.
The main issue with Revisionist is that Fritch reins in his primordial ideas too much—namely, by integrating them into non-descript song structures. The songs on the album spend a lot of time seesawing between two or three chords, which are squeezed for all attendant drama as they would be in a post-rock coda. The songwriting feels underdone; a side note instead of a focal point. A few striking ideas emerge, such as the catchy vocal motif in the hazy, timpani-punctuated pastorale "Unholy Frames". Fritch’s periodic field-holler chorale harmonies (see the shoegaze-inflected, Benoît Pioulard-produced "Winds" and funereal waltz "Imposters") are attractive, but they are not always forceful enough to disguise the basic formlessness of the melodies they embellish.
Revisionist doesn't feel like a grand summary of Fritch’s project; in fact, it’s less alluring than some of the earlier, more cacophonous offerings in the series (see last April’s Emptied Animal). On those tracks, his vocals function more as an equal part of the overall sheen, or aren’t there at all. "Revising", in the new album’s libretto, refers to trying to reimagine, or even lie to one’s self about the past. "Remain[ing] weightless and refus[ing] to be ashamed," or just "holding on" and pushing onwards is presented as an alternative to this—a way to avoid getting bogged down in self-doubt. It’s an appropriate metaphor for Fritch’s own creative process: hustling from one bare point of inspiration to the next, without leaving time to reflect or regret.
