Some of the wooziness of Westerman’s early work is still here. Intro “S. Machine” teases a more off-kilter album, with erratic synthetic horns that land somewhere between 22, a Million and an Animusic DVD. What follows is more soothing, but with added complexity from Warpaint and Kurt Vile drummer Stella Mozgawa. Her layers of drums and percussion capture Westerman’s restlessness on “Adriatic,” while her subtle dropped beats on “Mosquito” lend a sense of dread to the song’s serenity. Westerman’s lyrics are often difficult to interpret, but his singing sounds clearer than ever: Unlike the last two records, he frequently dips into his lower range, exchanging the Bon Iver-esque falsetto for something closer to the range of Stephen Merritt. That shift helps land a genuinely funny moment on “Adriatic” where he announces, “I head back to Ithaca,” then dramatically intones, “not New York.”
It all comes together on“Weak Hands,” the first track Westerman worked on with Salogni and his best since “Confirmation.” It’s an existential crisis of a song, musing on an unnamed figure’s impending mortality: “Look at you running, my friend, to that desert in the sky… My dear, my hologram, my lord of mirrors/It’s coming.” The rudimentary synths of Your Hero Is Not Dead return, now treated like the ornate arrangements of Inbuilt Fault, a surreal wall of sound grounded by Ben Reed’s lightly overdriven bass. “Weak Hands” still calls back to Talk Talk, Peter Gabriel, and all the other art-rock totems Westerman has been compared to. But in its unconventional collection of those influences, and in his unvarnished delivery of the song’s esoteric lyrics, it feels like something new.
