Max García Conover: Burrow

Sam

Gone to ground

Surviving winter with Max García Conover

Part of what made Bon Iver’s debut For Emma, Forever Ago so instantly important was the almost tangible feeling of solitude it conveyed. Even if Justin Vernon’s words were muffled and muted at times, it didn’t matter. You feel like you were right there in that cabin in the woods with him.

Max García Conover’s debut full-length, Burrow, doesn’t rise to the emotional heights of that album, but it shares a starkness, like listening to music through an Instagram filter, that conveys that same feeling of going to ground. Recorded in an attic studio over the winter by Pete Morse, the album is full of brief songs (just one of the 11 goes past three minutes) that can pass you by like a wisp of emotion triggered by a memory that’s just out of reach.

Morse is more than just engineer, though. While Conover takes center stage with a fast and note-filled fingerstyle guitar playing and a resonant lower-register vocal, Morse chimes in and fills out with hints of guitar lines, doubling down on the atmosphere. Combine all that with Conover’s penchant for jamming lyrics into tight spaces and going outside your standard subject matter (this may be the only album you listen to this year to feature a woodthrush) and the album can at times feel like watching old super 8 movies on a projector that’s moving slightly too fast.

“New Beast” is a stand out, with Sophie Nelson lending accompanying vocals for the entire track and more of a melodic hook than most songs here. Conover is accusatory: “You can talk of nothing … I don’t know what you’re for.” His playing is particularly engaging on “The Glow #4,” where he sits on top of a Morse guitar like an organ line that is a warmth to indicate nostalgia: “There she goes / Grabbing from her tiptoes / And staggering, staggering.”

The best track, though is the longest and almost hidden at the end of the album. “The Wedding Line” maybe stands out mostly for Conover’s solitary use of a more traditional strum, and vocals like he’s whispering in your ear so that you can almost feel his breath on your neck. Like the best Wesley Allen Hartley songs, I found myself straining to make out every word and was often pleased when they came into focus: “Everybody calls her a poet / But they say it when they’re rolling their eyes.”

There’s a lot to unpack here and spring seems like a good time to air it out.

Photo Credit: Greta Rybus

KGFREEZE: Sociopath

Sam

Cozy up to KGFREEZE

Songs for people who don’t like people

As the driving force behind two of the better projects to ever release music in Portland – Cosades and Grand Hotel (and Glory Trap was pretty fun) – when Kyle Gervais says he’s got a solo project in the works, people pay attention. A musician’s musician, with a deep knowledge of and love for a wide spectrum of work, Gervais has a way of pushing boundaries and challenging the listener with songs that are familiar at their core.

On this first KGFREEZE album, Sociopath, you can almost be lulled into thinking he’s making pop songs. The opening and title track is way more playful than anything Gervais had done in the recent lead-up, with a bouncy and melodic bass line and colorful keyboards. But what’s he been up to?

“I spent the last year drinking every night and lying to myself / And everybody else.”

There you have it. Playing everything on the album but the drums (he brought in Derek Gierhan for that), Gervais has created songs that play out like he’s lying on the couch and you’re the psychologist. Or his girlfriend. “I never feel comfortable around anyone I don’t really know,” he confides in the ’80s-fueled “Razzle Dazzle,” “she liked the way I was when it was just the two of us.” Like many of the songs here, instead of stark contrasts between verses and choruses we get a simmering that threatens to boil, but never quite gets to that point, as the heat is toggled up and down almost schizophrenically.

“Why you only call me when you wanna hook up,” he eventually accuses. “I’m getting tired, baby, of calling your bluff.”

Often, as in “Dancing” or “Come Around,” a repeating bass line is presented as a foundation on which he builds chiming keyboard chords or spare electric guitar leads. His vocals can sound desperate, pleading, but then switch quickly to haughtiness.

“Close Encounters” is positively brooding, with narcotized vocals in the open encouraging, “you should get a little high with me / He’ll still be there when you get back home,” before he apes Sunset Hearts and settles into a strutting bounce: “I’m sorry I screamed / But you know I still love you.”

“In too Deep” is full of twinkling keyboards, like seeing stars; “I Want You” is like an early Michael Jackson song from an alternative universe. “Come Around” finishes with this quickly delivered “really wanna give you my love” that sounds like it could have come off a Timberlake album.

Sociopath is the kind of record I couldn’t quite come to grips with in the span of a mere 10 days of listening or so. Sometimes all I can hear is the chiming chords that infuse “Can’t Get My Mind Off of You” like a clock striking 100 o’clock. At one point in “Closer” I thought Gervais was going to enter with a rap verse like early Run DMC. And yet most of these songs are pretty damn accessible.