Chuck Johnson - Balsams

Pitchfork 81

Pedal steel guitar is such an evocative instrument that just one chord emanating from its strings can suggest entire worlds. Often that’s exactly how it is used: one chord at a time, doled out sparingly to enhance moods already established by other instruments. But what if you give pedal steel guitar the starring role? That’s what Chuck Johnson does on Balsams, an album that’s drowning in waves of pedal steel, accompanied only by sparse, time-marking bass tones. It’s a simple formula, but Johnson mines it for rich music that feels infinitely expressive.

This isn’t exactly a shock, given that Johnson was already pretty great at creating moods with a guitar. He’s made three previous albums of subtle finger-picked acoustic work, as well as a full-band effort—last year’s Velvet Arc—that used pedal steel more traditionally. But there’s something singular about what he’s done on Balsams. It feels like a universe unto itself, one where each slow, patient strain of pedal steel builds on the previous one. Individually, none of the album’s six tracks sounds very different from each other, but as a whole they create a three-dimensional sonic space that expands and evolves.

In that sense, Balsams is more an ambient album than a folk-based guitar record. Think of it as country post-rock: Johnson’s hypnotic music conjures cinematic landscapes as strong as those evoked by Stars of the Lid or Flying Saucer Attack, but his guitar’s gentle twang sounds more like a desert with wafting tumbleweeds than a sky with drifting clouds. Whatever images the album might inspire, there is definitely a lot of weather happening in Balsams’ widescreen scenes. You can feel air moving, sand sifting, and sun baking as Johnson’s guitar chords gradually stretch across the horizon.

In the album’s best moments, those chords regenerate and deepen, making it hard to tell where one sound begins and another ends. During “Riga Black,” guitar tones continually emerge and fade in overlapping circles; in “Moonstone,” rising chords spawn textures that trail each other. At times, Johnson’s sounds transcend standard associations with the pedal steel guitar, as on opener “Calamus,” whose long echoes resemble a bowed violin or a soaring synth as much as metal sliding across strings.

Within this guitar-heavy environment, Johnson’s bass notes at first feel like afterthoughts, but they turn out to be crucial. Often they provide steps for the pedal steel to climb, their short durations propelling longer atmospherics that climb higher with each passing tone. This recalls the way Labradford often used simple notes to carve a path for grander tones, and Johnson proves just as adept at that move. His approach shines most vividly during “Labrodite Eye,” where the up-and-down crests of pedal steel are pulled by bass like gravity tugging at tides. It’s a supporting role, akin to the reassuring tick of a clock, but once you’ve let Balsams fully mesmerize you, it’s hard to imagine any of Johnson’s songs without that transfixing metronome.

It seems that Johnson’s main goal here is to transfix—perhaps not just the listener but himself as well. It must have been tempting for him to swerve from his devout sonic path, adding a drumbeat hear or a voice there, or even just a three-note guitar solo somewhere. But part of the beauty of Balsams is that it entrances not in spite of its homogeneity, but because of it. In one sense, it’s an experiment to see what pedal steel guitar can do when it’s asked to do it all. But the results make Balsams more than that: a fully realized sonic world, and one worth visiting for a long time.