William Tyler - Modern Country

The Guardian 100

(Merge)

American guitarist William Tyler’s excellent fourth album begins with an anxiety attack and ends with an interpolation of Dire Straits’ Sultans of Swing so subtle, I’m still not sure it’s there. The instrumental album strung between those two poles is of such eloquence it renders them superfluous. Context almost gets in the way. Modern Country is a beatific and expansive ambient record daubed in acoustic and electric guitars, analogue oscillations, some really scary bells and no words; its meaning can be fluid.

The bittersweet melody, the gem-like chord progressions, the sense of acceptance – it’s all succour

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Sun Jun 12 08:00:17 GMT 2016

Pitchfork 80

William Tyler is not a traditional storyteller. Having played guitar alongside some of Nashville’s most distinctive songwriters (Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner and Silver Jews’ David Berman), he has clearly learned a good deal from them about establishing his voice, structuring narratives, and building tension. But Tyler—whose solo albums are purely instrumental—works in a field all his own, composing increasingly intricate and immersive narratives with just his playing. Tyler referred to his 2013 Merge Records debut Impossible Truth as being a “’70s singer-songwriter record without vocals,” and he develops that vision even more fully on its follow-up, Modern Country. Backed by an all-star band that notably includes Wilco’s Glenn Kotche and Megafaun’s Phil Cook, Tyler is able to summon a wide range of moods, from plaintive pastoral folk to a particular kind of kosmische American music that fuses Brad Cook’s spacey synths and Luke Schneider’s gorgeous pedal steel like a slow, steady breeze on a hot summer day.

Even with all the talent in the room, Tyler’s guitar remains front and center. In “Kingdom of Jones,” his close-mic’d fingerpicking is breathtaking. The clear, constant sound of his strings rattling and his hand sliding across the neck highlight just how intimately produced and carefully performed these songs are. While quieter moments like these feel like a natural progression from Tyler’s early solo guitar work, other songs demonstrate how complex his signature style has become. Of course, there are enough sprightly, rubbery guitar licks to remind you that this is a guy whose official website also functions as a carefully curated Grateful Dead video blog. Still, Tyler puts an emphasis on both words in the album title. The compressed, layered solos in the first half of “The Great Unwind” recall prime-era Mark McGuire, while its triumphant, chugging second half actually brings to mind prime-era Mark Knopfler. First single “Gone Clear,” meanwhile, is Tyler’s most dazzling composition yet: a six-minute stunner that plays like Jim O’Rourke’s The Visitor reimagined to soundtrack a ballet.

Tyler’s thematic inspirations are equally far-reaching. “Kingdom of Jones” is dedicated to the Mississippi county whose anti-slavery stance during the Civil War put them at odds with the rest of the Confederacy. The lilting, starry-eyed “Albion Moonlight” is named for the title character of Kenneth Patchen’s American classic The Journals of Albion Moonlight (a character who coincidently posits that “Man has been corrupted by his symbols” and that “Language has killed his animal”—arguments put into practice by the band's quiet, evocative performances). Like his holographic figure on the album cover, Tyler lets himself become a part of his surroundings throughout Modern Country, encouraging his listeners to explore for themselves.

“The cultural geography of this vanishing America is what I sense as a slow fade,” spoke Tyler’s disembodied voice in a trailer announcing the album’s release: the kind of grandiose mission statement that might seem over-the-top were it not coming from an artist whose music is so radiantly full of ideas. He continued, “Modern Country is a love letter to what we are losing in America– to what we’ve already lost.” The beauty of the album lies in the fact that Tyler is able to pay homage to these foundations not with bitterness or cynicism but with awe, appreciation, and even hope.

Thu Jun 02 05:00:00 GMT 2016

Tiny Mix Tapes 80

William Tyler
Modern Country

[Merge; 2016]

Rating: 4/5

Modern Country begins with a track titled “Highway Anxiety” that sweeps by like a momentary blink of awareness stretched out to the lengths of infinity, both immediately recognizable and slowly fading into obscurity. It’s the longest (and simplest) song on William Tyler’s latest sonnet to the American countryside, its entirety dedicated to a single loping riff that continually bears into itself, gaining strength in its restatements and evolution until eventually its sense of time becomes nebulous, its drift as much an environment as the landscape that came before it. Tyler’s music has always borne a deep love for the idea of place — specifically the great, mythological West — but Modern Country is his first to understand that relationship through the lens of time, to wrestle with the difficulties of how change can affect that love we carry for certain memories and geographies that haunt our day-to-day lives. Calling it patriotic would be foolhardy; even if Modern Country is as pastoral and sentimental a record as Tyler has made yet, its vision of home comes with the stinging knowledge that the past is a closed door to us, that our endless return to tradition is what ultimately flattens and ambers us into a mere reflection of our environment: unthinking, unmoving, chained to shelter and survival as the only true means of living. Its folk music feels as if it’s from another time, yet when given to us now, it is a reminder from an old soul in a young body of how powerful gazing into history can be, even as it remains eternally severed from who we are now.

Out of all of Tyler’s releases, Modern Country is the least sonically bound to that old spirit of the American Primitive, freely taking on a more urban, full-band approach that lifts some of the pressure off Tyler’s dexterous, roaming fingerpicking technique. And yet that isolation spelled out so celestially by John Fahey all those years ago still informs these songs, their wordless cascade of tensing and resolving chords beckoning to every single piece of music we’ve ever heard in our lives, distilled now into a calm, cleansing breeze. The sun-drenched blear of Impossible Truth has been polished off without fully returning to the echoing bedroom yarn of Behold The Spirit, and the resulting album finds a halfway home somewhere between dusk and dawn, making the album art all the more appropriate. (However, Merge, I beg of you: please stop plastering awkward silhouettes of your newest alt-country signees all over your artwork. This cover would’ve been brilliant had you just let the scenery breathe.) Although it is Tyler’s shortest work to date, its scope is his widest yet, seizing the reigns like a classic Western in search of its farthest horizon — yet the crucial irony here is that Tyler’s path has already been tread by countless others long before he ever set his sights on the open-tuned guitar, the doctrines of country and rock music already a bygone era for those of us born in the advent of digital restructure. Is making old-fashioned music a revolutionary act in this day and age? More importantly, as long as there are artists like Tyler carving humanity out of steel strings and wood, can we ever declare such a form truly dead?

But let’s return to that mystical love of place that Tyler has so openly declared throughout his tenure as a solo artist. The music on Modern Country is distinctly rural in flavor, accentuated by deep sliding guitars (“Albion Moonlight”), light side stick drumming (“Sunken Garden”), and plenty of Tyler’s unmistakable fingerstyle that sits somewhere between ragtime jubilance and classical purity (“Kingdom of Jones”). On “Gone Clear,” he conducts a hymnal sequence of opaque, circular guitar patterns that culminate in a Philip Glass-ian parade of bells, all while never abandoning his own particular sense of adventure and thirst for frontier majesty. This attachment to a certain idea of where we came from (or perhaps where we’re going) may be both powerful and universal, but it forces the question of whether a place in itself is even capable of carrying meaning on its own. As rich as our own histories might be with the hills of where we grew up and the cities we dreamt of escaping to, the lands themselves have never held so much as a passing semblance of essence or beauty compared to our own projections of fertile soul upon them. At the heart of all this empty expanse of country, the often forgotten center of America more akin to a landlocked archipelago than a united core, we find that a place only really bears significance to us as we impress ourselves onto it, our own ideas becoming streams and mountains of thought that may comfort or frighten us as they manifest into a being overwhelmingly more eternal than ourselves.

In reality, our modern impulse of looking back through the annals of time and geography for inspiration has almost everything to do with where we are in the present moment, making Modern Country a particularly apt daydream from William Tyler, both achingly longing and inherently inseparable from its 21st-century origin. Although country and blues music are as far from the spotlight as they’ve ever been (at least in the circles Tyler is playing for these days), they persist on vitally into the future, eulogizing and keeping record of a past that is rapidly disappearing into our rearview, a trail of dust that before long will be indistinguishable from the dark clouds we’ve endeavored to leave behind. There is beauty and anguish to poring through Tyler’s songbook, a reckoning with spirits that refuse to die even as the world spins on furiously and without regard for the passages of humankind not willed or fortunate enough to keep up with the storm. These are stories that will be told as long as there is a soul to tell them, coded through texts becoming ever more arcane, and in translating them back to one another, we can see exactly what we’ve become.

01. Highway Anxiety
02. I’m Gonna Live Forever (If It Kills Me)
03. Kingdom of Jones
04. Albion Moonlight
05. Gone Clear
06. Sunken Garden
07. The Great Unwind

Thu Jun 02 05:34:59 GMT 2016

The Guardian 80

(Merge)

William Tyler manages to say a lot without ever uttering a word. Despite featuring little besides gentle strums and fingerpickings, the Nashville guitarist’s ruminative folk and country pieces speak eloquently to what the critic Greil Marcus called the “old weird America”, evoking a forgotten place of eerie backroads and abandoned gas stations. Modern Country, Tyler’s third album, is described as a “love letter” to this vanishing world. Yet for all the focus on the past, it is musically a lightyear-leap forwards. Largely gone is the solo acoustic focus of his early work, replaced by something approaching a recognisable “band” sound, featuring electric guitars, drum machines and even hints of synths. This might seem risky: Tyler’s refrains are so tender and intricate that cloaking them in instrumentation could smother them. But on tracks such as the droning, ominous Gone Clear and the chiming pastoral folk of I’m Gonna Live Forever (If It Kills Me), Tyler’s backing group only serves to deepen and accentuate his spectral, ageless melodies. The result is an album that feels rich and rewarding, revealing new details on each listen.

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Thu Jun 02 21:45:20 GMT 2016