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Bill Orcutt

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Bill Orcutt, “How To Rescue Things” (Palilalia, 2024)

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This latest opus from San Francisco avant-guitar visionary Bill Orcutt is a charming and improbable outlier in his strange and wonderful discography, as it feels like a remarkably sincere homage to easy listening, the golden age of Hollywood, and schmaltz in general. As Tom Carter observes in the album’s description, the pervasive orchestral sweetening of the mid-20th century is far from beloved to most contemporary ears (particularly among jazz fans), but the title’s provocative Ornette Coleman-style statement of intent is largely an irony-free one, as Orcutt gamely improvises along with a shifting fantasia of angelic choirs, rippling harps, and swooning string swells. While all of the usual hallmarks of Orcutt’s distinctive playing (scrabbling flurries of notes, cathartic bends, viscerally abused strings) are present and remain as delightful as ever, most of the melodic heavy lifting is done by the looped samples. Freed from the burden of carrying the central melody with his guitar, Orcutt’s playing feels uniquely loose, tender, and spacious, resulting in an unexpectedly heartwarming and endearingly soulful major key blues album that is every bit as strong as the more explosive and idiosyncratic work that he is usually known for.

It is tempting to view this album as Orcutt’s inversion of the softening and sweetening “jazz-strings virus,” as Carter’s analysis focuses primarily on that element (though he does also mention “the oily underbelly of the American songbook”). The reality of How To Rescue Things is a bit more complex, however, as the first third of the album sounds a hell of a lot more like Orcutt is jamming along to a pre-irony (and pre-bebop) Christmas movie from the 1930s or 1940s and none of the appropriated loops are particularly recognizable from the The Great American Songbook (though I am hardly an expert on that subject). There is definitely an inversion happening, of course, but it feels like a sincere and tender one: Orcutt is essentially taking toothlessly sentimental melodic motifs and “fixing” them with a healthy injection of soul, slicing intensity, and vibrant spontaneity. In fact, this album amusingly reminds me of Prince’s performances on Muppets Tonight: an iconic and innovative artist improbably dropped into a family-friendly and ostensibly ridiculous situation and somehow emerging looking as cool as ever. In this case, however, the Muppets are swapped out for choirs of angels and harp-wielding cherubs, but Orcutt proves to be equally game at embracing his environment in good faith and making the crazy collision of aesthetics work beautifully. Moreover, he manages to make it feel both easy and natural, which makes a lot of sense in hindsight: if you are not jaded to an absolutely joyless degree, there is plenty of legitimate heartstring-tugging beauty and magic to be gleaned from a beatific celestial chorus if you know how to do it right. 

While I would not have predicted that the guy from Harry Pussy would be the first one to make such a leap, Orcutt has always been an artist who tirelessly searches for new ways to escape familiar patterns and he has long been one with a fondness for inventively revisiting well-worn, sentimental melodies as well. As such, it is not a huge leap to go from covering “When You Wish Upon A Star” or “Over The Rainbow” to How To Rescue Things. That said, Orcutt’s approach is definitely quite different this time around, as I would not have predicted how sympathetically he would treat his source material. While I am certain that a noise-guitar firestorm or a thorny freeform excursion into the outer limits of improv would have been a perfectly fine (and more expected) enhancement of these loops, Orcutt instead seamlessly embraces the tone of his appropriated melodies and simply embellishes the central themes with some more vibrant melodic tendrils of his own. 

Given that, How To Rescue Things is not exactly an album of fresh Bill Orcutt pieces so much as it is a snapshot of a great guitarist endearingly indulging himself in fond memories and breathing new life into them with his improvised accompaniments. As such, my enjoyment of any particular piece is largely determined by how much I enjoy the central loop, as Orcutt’s playing is invariably loose, organic, and intuitive in a way that few other guitarists can match. There is no point at all in which it feels like he is cycling through familiar scales or trotting out pre-meditated riffs: he is simply living in the moment, nimbly riding waves of old-timey sentimentality with casual effortlessness and transforming them into something newly relevant and emotionally resonant. 

I do have some favorites, however, as I connected most deeply with the bittersweetly lovely “Old Hamlet” and the closing “The Wild Psalms,” which has the feel of an absolutely rapturous Hollywood ending. I cannot say that I felt particularly optimistic about the state of the world at the end of 2024, but that piece in particular made me feel like everything was absolutely wonderful and would presumably stay that way forever (for five glorious minutes, at least). I can safely say that no other album in recent memory has made me feel that way, so How To Rescue Things is a legitimately great detour in my book.

Listen here.

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Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt, “Play at Duke” (Palilalia, 2023)

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These two singular artists have been fitfully playing together for roughly a decade now and they have released a number of albums documenting their incredible duo performances. Notably, their most recent union was for 2021’s absolutely killer Made Out of Sound album, but that one was a bit of an aberration for the duo, as it was a studio creation crafted remotely. Happily, Play at Duke captures the pair back together on stage where they belong. The stage in question was unsurprisingly at Duke University, but the album’s prosaic title omits a rather significant detail: the performance in question closed out Three Lobed Recording’s 21st anniversary festival in appropriately riveting fashion. While both artists rank among my favorite musicians and have truly incredible chemistry as an improv unit, some performances are undeniably better than others and Play at Duke feels like an especially inspired night to me. Moreover, Orcutt and Corsano make a virtue of brevity as well, as there is not a single wasted note or even a hint of a lull in this 25-minute tour de force.

The performance feels like an unusually joyous one right from its first rolling toms and major chords, which makes sense given that the performance was the culmination of a three-day festival in which Orcutt and Corsano were surrounded by great music, a host of their peers, and a sizable audience of receptive fans waiting to be properly blown away. It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment in which I was blown away myself upon hearing the album, but I am confident that it occurred some time during first of the performance’s three sections, as the duo quickly strain toward the transcendent and ecstatic (Orcutt’s wordless vocal howls tend to be a fairly reliable indicator that a particularly incendiary performance is underway). Naturally, there are plenty of killer licks and technically dazzling drum fills throughout the album, but the true beauty lies less in what Corsano and Orcutt play than it does in how they play it, how they interact with each other, and how they feed off the volatile spontaneity of live improvisation.

Stylistically, the terrain on Plays at Duke will be quite familiar to Bill Orcutt fans: a freewheeling blend best described as sort of virtuosic No Wave blues, though there are occasionally some Hendrix-y touches that feel like a fresh development. I was far more struck by the sheer visceral ferocity of Orcutt’s playing, however, as he frequently unleashes fiery frenzies of wild bends, violent twangs, snapping open strings, convulsive riff deconstructions, and rapidly scrabbling fretboard runs. Notably, however, those expected firestorms are beautifully (and seamlessly) balanced with more tender and melodic passages where Orcutt will linger on a single note or chord. While I tend to prefer the more intense passages as a whole, those more feral passages are able to make a deep impact over and over again primarily because Orcutt and Corsano share a virtuosic intuition for effectively manipulating dynamics: intensity waxes and wanes, attacks and decays vary, and a soulful array of other moods are touched upon far beyond “ecstatic volcano.” Both Orcutt and Corsano are in peak form on Play at Duke, as it feels like I am hearing two incredible solos at once that are organically intertwined, thrillingly spontaneous, and much, much more than the sum of their parts.

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Bill Orcutt, “Jump On It” (Palilalia, 2023)

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This latest LP from San Francisco-based guitar visionary Bill Orcutt is a spiritual successor of sorts to 2013’s A History of Every One, as that was apparently his last solo acoustic guitar album. The resemblance between the two albums largely ends there, however, as Jump On It is as different from the deconstructed standards of History as it is from last week’s Chatham-esque guitar quartet performance for NPR. While I do enjoy Orcutt’s Editions Mego solo era quite a bit, there is no denying that his artistry has evolved dramatically over the last decade and his recent work definitely connects with me on a deeper level. In more concrete terms, Orcutt’s work no longer resembles the choppy, convulsive, and possessed-sounding fare of History, as he has since reined in his more fiery, passionate impulses enough to leave more room for passages of tender, simple beauty. In fact, Jump On It might be the farthest that the balance has swung towards the latter, as the characteristic Orcutt violence is a rare presence in the collection of quietly lovely and spontaneous-sounding guitar miniatures.

The album opens in appropriately gorgeous fashion, as the first minute of “What Do You Do With Memory” is devoted to a tender, halting and bittersweet arpeggio motif, though the piece then takes a detour before reprising that wonderful theme for the finale. The detour is admittedly brief, but so is the song itself, which illustrates a central feature of this album: these pieces generally feel like a series of spontaneous snapshots/3-minute vignettes rather than fully formed compositions that build into something more. That is not meant as a critique, but it does mean that Jump On It is something other than Orcutt’s next major artistic statement. I am tempted to say that most of this album feels akin to a pleasant but loose improvisation around a campfire, but there are also some pieces that evoke an usually meditative Django Reinhardt playing alone in a late-night hotel room.

The connective tissue between those two poles is, of course, casual virtuosity and that is the most readily apparent trait of Jump On It: it can feel languorous, pensive, and searching at times, but there are plenty of fiery runs, viscerally snapping bends, and surges of passion to keep things compelling and remind me that this is still very much a Bill Orcutt album. To my ears, “The Ocean Will Find Its Shore” is the album’s centerpiece, as its early sense of forward motion seamlessly dissipates into a tender reverie before more intense emotions bubble to the surface for a brief but intense crescendo. “In A Column Of Air” is another major highlight, however, as a lyrical minor key melody fitfully winds through scrabbling note flurries, quivering double-stops, emphatic chord sweeps, violent bends, and sundry other dynamic flourishes (and it all ends with a killer repeating riff to boot). Unsurprisingly, the remaining pieces are all enjoyable as well, albeit with the caveat that they generally feel more like sketches or miniatures than fresh, fully articulated masterpieces.

While I still heartily maintain that just about everything released on Orcutt’s main Palilalia imprint is compelling and significant, I am quite curious to see how this album in particular is received. It feels like one of his less substantial recent releases to me (particularly in the wake of Music For Four Guitars), yet it also seems like it could reach an atypically wide audience, as Orcutt’s characteristically soulful and singular playing is couched in a much more casual and intimate setting than the snarling, incendiary, and more overtly avant-garde fare that he is usually associated with.

Listen here.

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Bill Orcutt, “Music For Four Guitars” (Palilalia, 2022)

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Over the last few years, it has become quite clear to me that any major new solo guitar album from Bill Orcutt is destined to be an inventive, visceral, and damn near essential release. Unsurprisingly, Music for Four Guitars does absolutely nothing to disrupt that impressive run, yet I sometimes forget that Orcutt has a restless creative streak that endlessly propels him both outward and forward like some kind of avant garde shark. As a result, his discography is full of wild surprises, unexpected detours, and challenging experiments such as last year’s wonderfully obsessive and completely bananas A Mechanical Joey, so anyone who thinks they know exactly what to expect from a new Bill Orcutt album is either delusional or not paying close enough attention.

Case in point: Music for Four Guitars feels like an evolution upon Orcutt’s Made Out of Sound approach of using a second track to improvise against himself, but he now expands it to four tracks and shifts to a more composed, focused, and melodic approach very different from his volcanic duo with Chris Corsano. Notably, this project was originally intended for a Rhys Chatham-esque quartet of guitarists and has been gestating since at least 2015, but COVID-era circumstances ultimately led Orcutt to simply do everything himself. As Tom Carter insightfully observes in the album notes, this album is a fascinating hybrid of the feral spontaneity of Orcutt’s guitar albums and the “relentless, gridlike composition” of his electronic music that often calls to mind an imaginary Steve Reich-inspired post-punk/post-hardcore project from Touch and Go or Amphetamine Reptile’s heyday.

Given how much time I have spent enjoying a handful of Bill Orcutt’s recent masterpieces, I occasionally forget that he has been releasing albums for roughly three decades and his scrabbling, explosive improv eruptions are just one stylistic choice in an endlessly evolving body of work. I bring that up because Music For Four Guitars makes it clear that Orcutt could probably churn out killer riffs, intricate countermelodies, and inventive harmonies in his sleep and would seemingly be perfectly at home channeling his inner Glenn Branca, Built to Spill (“In The Rain”), Gang of Four (“From Below”), or art-damaged ’90s emo band like Departures and Landfalls-era Boys Life if he felt like it. All of those stylistic threads appear in varying forms here and the determining factors tend to be whether Orcutt is inclined to craft a tense, jerkily staccato rhythm (“A Different View”), sharpen a melody with a spiky counter motif (“Two Things Close Together”), or do both at once (“In Profile”).

At other times, Orcutt seems intent on channeling a locked groove escaping its confines or some kind of spasmodic mutant blues, but the results are invariably singular, melodic, and sharp-edged. If I had to glibly describe the album with one concise phrase, I would probably go with “sounds like a No Wave Steve Reich,” but I would also have to add the caveat that Music For Four Guitars feels quite different from other artists in that vein (such as Chatham and Branca).

The difference is subtle yet important, as Orcutt seems to be arriving at a similar place from the opposite direction: this is not post-punk stretching into the realm of high art–it is high art sharpened into slashing, snarling, and convulsive two-minute sketches of noise-damaged post-punk urgency (most of the time, at least). As a result, this is yet another stellar album from Orcutt and also a very different animal from his other recent classics.

While I probably still prefer the more fiery and spontaneous-sounding side of Orcutt’s formidable oeuvre overall, a strong case could be made that a piece like “Two Things Close Together” condenses virtually everything that I love about his work into a single near-perfect diamond.  

Listen here.

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Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt, “Made Out of Sound” (Palilalia, 2021)

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In theory, any album recorded by the duo of Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt should be an instant Album of the Year candidate for me, as the pair are easily among my favorite musicians on the planet. However, 2018‚Äôs explosive Brace Up! was not quite my thing, calling to mind Orcutt’s earlier and viscerally cacophonous Harry Pussy days. I have no doubt that seeing the duo live during that period would have either torn off my head or melted my face, but that album is not the one I reach for when I have an Orcutt craving. 

Happily, the opposite is true of this latest convergence of the two fiery improv iconoclasts, as Made Out of Sound resembles one of Orcutt’s more recent solo albums organically intertwined with some oft-incendiary free drumming. Despite being generally more melodic and less feral than its predecessor, however, the more nuanced Made Out of Sound is nevertheless a radical and intense recording in its own right. It is truly rare to encounter such seemingly effortless and fluid chemistry between two artists with such instantly recognizable and attention-grabbing aesthetics.

In wrestling with how to best describe Orcutt’s playing on this album, my mind predictably kept returning to the phrase Ira Gitler once famously used to describe John Coltrane’s aesthetic: “sheets of sound.” In Orcutt’s case, however, most of Made Out of Sound feels more like sheets of rain falling on a pond: individual drops constantly and rapidly changing the rippling patterns with each small splash. There is also the potential to be startled by a surprise duck. Translating that into more musical terms, the drops are the ringing open strings, the rippling pond is a mass of constantly evolving harmonies and dynamics, and the surprise duck is the snarling, snapping, and scrabbling flurries of notes that Orcutt sometimes unleashes. Notably, that metaphorical pond scene also includes a dangerously intense wave machine in the form of Corsano’s whirlwind free-form drumming.

Given their collaborative history, it is hardly surprising that the duo’s interplay feels so natural at this stage, yet the best moments of the album feel so uncannily instinctive and spontaneous that the wash of sound almost seems like a churning, heaving living organism. Remarkably, the duo recorded their parts separately from different coasts, which makes the “live” intensity and fluid interplay feel almost miraculous, but also allowed Orcutt more space for nuance than usual (as well as the ability to overdub a second guitar track). 

If I was forced to choose a favorite piece, I would probably pick one of the more melodic ones like the wistful “Some Tennessee Jar” or clattering, tumbling pathos of “Man Carrying Thing,” but the whole damn album feels akin to witnessing a pair of magicians flawlessly perform one dazzling trick after another (the trick in each case being “distilling primal/art-damaged blues into a pure, expressionist catharsis that transcends conventional scales, chords, melodies, rhythms, and genre tropes”). Every single one of these pieces feels like a vivid eruption of pure, direct emotion that leaves compelling music in its wake. This is a canonical Bill Orcutt album.

Samples can be found here.

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Bill Orcutt, “Odds Against Tomorrow” (Palilalia, 2019)

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Bill Orcutt’s career admittedly had quite an abrasive and chaotic start with Harry Pussy, but it has always been abundantly clear that he is one of the more idiosyncratic and explosive guitar stylists on the planet. It was not until he started releasing solo albums, however, that I began to feel like he was some kind of outsider genius rather than a room-clearing noise maniac (though I imagine it was impossible to convey any emotion more subtle than “baseball bat to the face” with a human volcano like Adris Hoyos behind the drum kit). 

In any case, Orcutt’s late-career shift to more intimate, melodic material has been nothing short of a revelation and 2017’s self-titled studio album was the brilliant culmination of that evolution. With this follow-up, Orcutt occasionally hits some similar highs, but Odds Against Tomorrow is more of an intriguing transitional album or lateral move than another instant classic, as he mostly dispenses with playing standards to focus on his own compositions and some very promising experiments with multi-tracking.

It is both remarkable and amusing that the most radical change to Orcutt’s aesthetic on Odds Against Tomorrow is that he allowed himself the luxury of multi-track recording on three songs (he is closing in on three decades of recording at this point). In a sense, that decision marks the end of an era, as one of Orcutt’s more appealing traits has always been his no-frills spontaneity and devotion to raw, undiluted expression. He might be a solo guitarist with a fondness for The Great American Songbook, but a strong case could be made that he is also the last No Wave artist standing, as he remained devoted to visceral, unpolished passion long after everyone else had moved on. 

While certainly admirable, such an approach admittedly has extreme limitations, as a dazzling technical performance does not always translate into a great album: the world is littered with disappointing records that proudly proclaim that they were performed live with no overdubs or studio enhancements. Conversely, there are even more albums where artists suck the life out of their work through misguided perfectionism. The trick, of course, is to find a balance between those opposing impulses that best suits the material. I do not think Orcutt is in any danger of becoming hopelessly enthralled by the limitless possibilities of modern recording techniques anytime soon (he recorded this album in his living room rather than returning to a studio), but he definitely shows a strong intuition for making the most out of overdubbing. In fact, my favorite two pieces on the album are ones in which Orcutt accompanies himself.

The first highlight is the opening title piece, which has a lazily lyrical melody that harkens back to the standards cannibalized on Bill Orcutt. It is an elegantly simple piece with an appealingly casual feel, as the second guitar provides a languorously unfolding backdrop of chiming chords and arpeggios for Orcutt to solo over. The solo itself is similarly unhurried, spacious, and quietly lovely, but there are occasional eruptions of violence where the melody is fleeting transformed into strangled, scrabbling snarls of notes. It is a perfect illustration of what makes Orcutt’s recent work so striking and uniquely beautiful, as he has found a way to sound both sublimely poetic and unpredictably prone to flashes of slashing violence. 

Consequently, he manages to avoid ever lapsing into mere prettiness, as there is always a fiery and primal soulfulness ready to tear viscerally through even the gentlest melody. Moreover, such eruptions always feel appropriate and fully earned when they happen. For the most part, the difference between a great Bill Orcutt song and a decent Bill Orcutt song lies solely in the melodic strength of the piece that is being deconstructed and ripped open, which is why exploring timeless, familiar melodies has served him so well in the past.The only real nod to such evergreen standards this time around, however, is a brief, tender, and quaveringly chorus-heavy rendering of “Moon River.” 

It is a strong piece, but it is an anomaly. In fact, just about all of the best pieces on Odds Against Tomorrow are anomalies, as the album description notes that it is “a rock record—almost.” I would describe it more as “a blues record—almost” myself, as pieces like the slow-burning “Already Old” and the Elmore James-inspired “Stray Dog” are explicitly blues-based. Such pieces are the core of the album, but they are quite a far cry from Tomorrow‘s second highlight, the pulsing Glenn Branca-esque minimalism of “A Writhing Jar.”

On balance, there are more inspired pieces than lulls or misfires on Odds Against Tomorrow, but the inclusion of “Stray Dog” illustrates the sometimes uneven and perplexing nature of the album: it is essentially just a standard blues vamp with standard blues scale soloing (albeit played on a four-string guitar). It reminds me of a critique I once read which stated that a band was great before they had completely figured out what they were doing, but disappointing once they actually became competent enough to successfully imitate their influences (which is what they were subconsciously trying to do all along). A straight homage to classic blues is not particularly interesting and can be readily found in small-town biker bars all over the US. Hearing classic blues pass through the filter of Bill Orcutt’s vision to emerge in razor sharp and unrecognizable form, on the other hand, is wonderful. After hearing the latter, it is very hard to embrace the former. 

On a related note, I find Orcutt to be quite a fascinating enigma, as he seems perversely and almost exclusively fixated on cultural phenomena that occurred before he was born: this album borrows its name from a 1959 film noir, Elmore James died in 1963, and the double-tracking was purportedly inspired by a 1952 John Lee Hooker single. And, of course, the golden age of The Great American songbook was already waning in the ’50s (though “Moon River” managed to belatedly sneak in in 1961). How Orcutt manages to translate a nostalgia for both the dark side and the cheery illusion of the 1950s’ American Dream into something so vital and bracingly contemporary is beyond me, but I am damn glad he figured out a way to do it (either consciously or otherwise). While Odds Against Tomorrow is an imperfect album, it is an imperfect album by a legitimate iconoclast who remains one of the most compelling guitarists around.

Samples can be found here.

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Bill Orcutt, “Bill Orcutt” (Palilalia, 2017)

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Like many, I picked up Bill Orcutt’s self-released solo guitar debut (New Ways to Pay Old Debts) back in 2009 and was completely floored by its idiosyncratic primitivism. There was nothing on earth quite like it, as it captured visionary art in its rawest, purist form: Orcutt was a virtuosic dervish violently attacking a four-string acoustic guitar, howling and moaning along when the mood struck him. It sounded positively feral. It also sounded like it was composed spontaneously and recorded into a boom box (it was even periodically disrupted by ringing phones and passing trucks). 

In a perverse way, it was almost too perfect—I never got around to picking up any of Orcutt’s follow-ups on Editions Mego because it seemed like there was nowhere to go from the demonic possession supernova of his first salvo. As it turns out, I was wrong about that, as Orcutt has spent the ensuing years moving in a more melodic direction. This latest release is a culmination of that evolution, as Orcutt picked up an electric guitar, headed to an actual studio, and recorded a suite of originals and standards. If that sounds tame, it is not: Orcutt’s biting and percussive renditions of chestnuts like “When You Wish Upon A Star” are every bit as explosive as I would want them to be, but the (slightly) stronger emphasis on melody goes a long way towards making Orcutt’s vision a bit more conducive to repeat listening.

It is not hyperbole to describe Orcutt’s solo guitar style as unique, as he often sounds like he is clawing and snapping at the strings in a white-hot rage, unleashing sharp and disjointed flurries of notes. In fact, he often sounds a hell of a lot more like a free-jazz saxophonist than a guitarist in his approach, though his chosen weapon provides a percussive, visceral bite rather than a primal howl. Remarkably, Orcutt already had quite a distinctive and influential style back in his days with Harry Pussy, but his solo career sounds he went to hell and back in the interim and returned as a completely transformed artist. Obviously, the thread linking the two eras is that Orcutt is quite noisy and averse to conventional chords and melodies (understandable, since his guitar is still missing two strings), but Orcutt’s solo work is intense and intimate on an entirely different level. 

On this album, however, some fragmented melodies do manage to dance and dart through the pointillist storms of notes, particularly in the opening “Lonely Woman.” It is apparently based upon the Ornette Coleman piece, but it seems to have just as much in common with Horace Silver’s noirish torch song and Orcutt comes closer to meeting the latter halfway, weaving a slow-moving, melancholy melody with plenty of soulful vibrato. It even sustains a kind of perverse beauty and dignity when it erupts in flurries of wild pull-offs, tremolo picking, jarring chords, and violently snapping notes, which is not true of some of the other standards here. For example, I would have a very hard time recognizing “Star Spangled Banner” in the squall of sharp twangs and vibrato-heavy double-stops of Orcutt’s version if I did not already know the song title. The same is quite true of “When You Wish Upon A Star.”

It is an interesting choice that Orcutt devotes so much of the album to feel-good songs with immediately recognizable melodies, since he generally transfigures them into something unrecognizably ecstatic and visceral. There are even two Christmas songs, one of which (a brief rendition of “White Christmas”) stands as one of the Bill Orcutt‘s legitimate highlights, as snatches of the melody keep unexpectedly bursting forth from an otherwise blues-y reverie. It is one of the more tender and nuanced pieces in this suite and beautifully highlights Orcutt’s genius for making individual notes cut through the clangor and feel meaningful. Elsewhere, Orcutt’s meditative interpretation of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is another beautiful stand-out, hewing quite close to the melody in a way that feels movingly wounded and precarious.

Orcutt’s sole new original piece, “The World Without Me,” is also quite beautiful, as he seems to treat his own melodies with a bit more reverence than he does elsewhere. In fact, “The World Without Me” actually feels like the perfect distillation of Orcutt’s aesthetic, as it is fundamentally a warm, languorous, and lyrical piece that only erupts into scrabbling flurries of notes for emphasis (as opposed to a frenzied, twanging cacophony with occasional glimpses of melody). 

Orcutt’s other original (“O Platitudes!” from his VDSQ album) is quite fine as well, resembling an electrified homage to classic bottleneck blues that periodically veers off the rails into gnarled and twanging crescendos of frenzied picking. The line between standards and originals is amusingly blurry and almost completely irrelevant throughout the album, as the originals feel like standards and the standards are frequently fragmented into unrecognizability. I imagine it all just depends on which melody Orcutt was idly playing around with before a piece began to take shape into a fully formed tour de force.

Uncharacteristically, I cannot find any flaws at all with this album, as it is the most accessible version of Orcutt’s brilliance that he possibly could have made without sacrificing anything important (though I do admittedly prefer the sharper attack of his acoustic guitar). The clear production and the absence of Orcutt’s strange and wordless vocalizing does not so much soften his sound as merely clear away any possible distractions from the volcanic display of four-stringed virtuosity taking place. Also, Orcutt’s increasing emphasis on melody provides a welcome grounding for his more outré displays: I certainly love the noisy bits, but they are always better and more meaningful when they emerge from an oasis of comparative musicality. 

This is simply a great album from start to finish. I am sure I overuse the word “visionary,” but it is entirely warranted to say that Bill Orcutt is a goddamn visionary who deserves every bit as much reverence as John Fahey. Granted, Fahey’s legacy is far more influential than Orcutt’s will ever be, but the two artists have a similarly radical and anachronistic body of work. The main difference is merely that Fahey’s backward-looking American Primitivism spawned plenty of imitators while Orcutt’s razor-edged brutalism is unlikely to spawn any descendants at all, as it presents an absolutely impossible act to follow.

Listen here.