For almost 20 years, the guitarist Trevor de Brauw has anchored the stalwart instrumental rock band Pelican. His chiseled riffs, stretching skyward from a crust of doom metal toward the wide skies of post-rock, have long been its real hook. As prolific as that band has been, de Brauw has kept busy with a litany of side-projects, too, from his new trio RLYR to the slow-motion creep of the drone collective Chord. Still, as late as last summer, de Brauw confessed to a lack of confidence in his guitar prowess, doubtful even of his ability to reproduce songs onstage. Making music, he said, was an emotional and mental necessity, not some chance to flex his technical abilities.
That compulsive approach is critical to Uptown, de Brauw’s solo debut. Instead of serving as a showcase, Uptown instead collects six open-ended, marvelously textured guitar instrumentals written during the last decade. Sure, there is a certain level of wizardry here, especially with guitar loops that wrap into Moebius strips of sound or the army of ways de Brauw warps the signals from his six strings. During the record’s tremendous finale, the twelve-minute beauty “From the Black Soil Poetry and Song Sprang,” de Brauw manages to conjure and control a symphony of guitars by himself. The piece suggests the choir-like calm of Rhys Chatham’s A Crimson Grail or Growing in its prime a decade ago.
There’s sophistication, too, in the ways that de Brauw patiently peels layers apart or puts them together. “Distinct Frequency” is little more than three minutes of a powerful drone and a broadcast of what might be the evening news, pitted against one another. But de Brauw pulls them apart so slowly that the music is dramatic and demanding, as if always on the verge of some major revelation. But Uptown is a subtle record, and both signals just fade into silence.
Indeed, the complexity and real delight of Uptown stem more from its commingled, nuanced emotions than its instrumental execution. These six songs are, alternately, messy webs of anxiety and comfort, frustration and hopefulness, fatigue and energy, together always pushing past simple binaries of happy or sad, light or dark. The deliberate chords of “They Keep Bowing,” for instance, seem at first caustic. But as they decay, they blossom into something beautiful, with individual notes suddenly circling above like halos.
Likewise, “Turn Up for What” (who said solo guitar records couldn’t have a sense of humor?) transitions from chimes and bells into a loud electric groan into, finally, a riff that aims for liftoff. The boundary between each phase is fuzzy, implying that each state is linked to the others. Like the intertwined loops and nested layers, there are no discrete or easy feelings to Uptown. It is, de Brauw says without a word, complicated.
The world of solo guitar records isn’t really the domain of urgent, timely statements. They are, more often, practiced steps on a continuum, sometimes speaking only to like-minded practitioners and listeners. Despite its long gestation, though, Uptown feels surprisingly necessary and somehow reassuring. There’s confusion and clarity within these songs, an understanding that these ideas and emotions only make sense in the presence of each other. During Uptown, the darkest parts sometimes allow for flickers of light, though other times the darkness swallows the light whole. It is an apt soundtrack for the start of 2017, then, when signs of pending apocalypse and revolution seem to bleed into one.
