What you say
No-one has reviewed An Optimist Notes The Dusk by David Grubbs yet.
What we say
 This record left our Phil feeling happy.
David Grubbs. The grubby handed finger plucker has a new album on Drag City on the multi formatting heaven that is CD and LP. 'An Optimist Deflects The Dust' is its name and it's a complex beast. Much too complex for me to explain in the paltry amount of time I have to do this so I'll be brief. Immediately it sounds like Gastr Del Sol but then seeing as though he was in 'em then that probably explains that one. The songs on here are long and they amble along seemingly going nowhere. Where can songs go?? Up? Down?? To the shops? On the album we have some minimal percussion, some meandering guitar playing and his vocals which dip in and out like a kingfisher grabbing at fish. I can be poetic too. It may go on a little at times but it certainly has its moments. Not bad like.
What the label says:
“A step into the void” is how David Grubbs describes AN OPTIMIST NOTES
THE DUSK, his first solo album since 2004’s A GUESS AT THE RIDDLE. Much
the same way that each of Gastr del Sol’s albums sought to avoid
precedent and to model a world in which nothing should be taken for
granted, AN OPTIMIST NOTES THE DUSK steps into the void. Nothing
necessitates — it’s all built from the ground up, and at each step of
the way it could have been built differently.
David Grubbs’s
previous solo albums have tended to divide cleanly between pop records
(THE THICKET, THE SPECTRUM BETWEEN, RICKETS & SCURVY, and A GUESS
AT THE RIDDLE) and more experimental, instrumental records that
investigate solo performance, drones, and hypnotic repetition. Grubbs’s
pop records stand in a series of increasing refinement. Here, the cards
have been shuffled (is he dealing with a full deck?). AN OPTIMIST NOTES
THE DUSK presents five longish songs and one eleven-minute instrumental
floor rumbler, and the album can’t be said to fall into either of the
previously staked camps. Much like Gastr del Sol’s recordings,
arrangements take their own sweet, otherworldly time to unfold, and
you’re likely to discover that the undertow is stronger than you
reckoned, and that you wind up a disorienting distance from where you
began. That describes the associative flow of individual songs and of
the album as a whole. How do you get from the exquisitely unraveling
song-skein of “Gethsemani Night” to the analog-synth sleeping bag of
“The Not-So-Distant”? The band left the building a long time ago.
Much
continues to be written about the end of the album and its splintering
into the MP3dom of individual songs. AN OPTIMIST NOTES THE DUSK is at
one and the same time an album and a collection of splinters. There is
no contradiction. Do we dare suggest that it feels very “playlist”?
The
electric guitar is central to AN OPTIMIST NOTES THE DUSK. In Grubbs’s
hands the guitar can be as languid and liquid as Loren Mazzacane
Connors’ (“Gethsemani Night”), as spikily anthemic as the Pretty Things
(“Holy Fool Music”), or as obsessively patterned as your favorite banjo
eccentric (“Eyeglasses of Kentucky”). Speaking (singing) of Kentucky,
Bluegrass-native
but Brooklyn-residing Grubbs seems to have lyrically reconstructed the
Kentucky of his dreams, with songs about Thomas Merton’s hermitage at
the Abbey of Gethsemani and Lexington photographer Ralph Meatyard’s
trick of turning the waiting room of his Eyeglasses of Kentucky store
into an exhibition space. Optometrist, optimist note the changing sky.
Two sonic secret weapons have been brought in: drummer and
percussionist Michael Evans and trumpeter Nate Wooley, both of
whom ride musical divides like they’ve never heard of such divisions. It’s all in making the right sound at the right time, what
could be easier?
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