Sandro Perri – In Another Life [LP]

Description

The first solo album from Sandro Perri since 2011s acclaimed Impossible Spaces (Best New Track, Top 50 Albums Of The Year Pitchfork) Features Dan Bejar (Destroyer) and Andr Ethier (The Deadly Snakes) as guest lead vocalists on the three-part opus Everybodys Paris RIYL: Van Morrison, Morton Feldman, Destroyer, Bill Callahan, Yo La Tengo, Arthur Russell Sandro Perri returns with In Another Life, his first new solo album since the acclaimed Impossible Spaces from 2011 (which garnered a Best New Track and Top 50 Albums of 2011 from Pitchfork, among many other accolades). Perri has been called one of the most singular producers in contemporary music (Boomkat) and his long affiliation with Constellation through various electronic and singer-songwriter guises (Polmo Polpo, Glissandro 70, Off World) has produced a uniquely adventurous and iconoclastic discography. In Another Life expands on this in peerless fashion. The new album is what Perri describes as an experiment in infinite songwriting. The title track is a 24-minute pop mantra for sequenced synth, piano, guitar and voice, progressing sideways rather than forward. A relaxed three-chord vamp runs the length of the albums Side One, peppered with Sandros languid, lilting vocal and adorned with continually developing musical details massaging the listener with the joys of repetition while defying stasis and monotony. Like the longer-form work of fellow-travellers Bill Callahan, Destroyer or Arthur Russell, Perri extends the notion of the meditative minimalist pop song to its literal maximum, flouting commercial concerns in our streamingly short-attention-span era and perhaps implicitly calling for a politics of slow consumption? The lyric of In Another Life suggests as much, moving through bemused critiques and degrees of equivocation about unrealized utopias, culminating with the final stanza: Beyond the choice of create or destroy / inherit, steal, gift or employ / Fair is far too small a word wed enjoy / In another life / So hold a promise no bigger than two hands / Hope scaled and re-read in human / And not reduced to a list of demands / In another life. Side Two of In Another Life features a similar approach, though in a distinct 3-part series: Everybodys Paris begins with Perri on vocals, with the mic then handed over to Andr Ethier (The Deadly Snakes) and Dan Bejar (Destroyer) respectively, who each take a vocal turn singing lyrics of their own. Sandro calls this a song-cycle designed to accept any lyrical variation fed into it: a fill-in-the-blanks questionnaire in the form of a song. Of course Everybodys Paris ends up being much more than this, with the evocative phrase of the songs title serving as the lyrical tent pole and recurring refrain; an anchor point for signification and sentiment that intentionally belies the suggestion of anything prosaic or administrative about Perris formal conceit. In the hands of these three master lyricists and voices and with Perri subtly reconfiguring the instrumentation and arrangements for each of the three parts Everybodys Paris emerges as a profound and fitting sibling (a set of triplet brothers?) to Side Ones infinite title track. The result is a gently yet enormously affecting album that basks thoughtfully and discerningly in a slow, sweet melancholia. In Another Life is a supremely listenable return to form for Sandro Perri, the music like a temporal analogue to a tender nature tableau registering slight changes under shifting light and a meditative gaze: at once appearing to signify only itself, while auguring the promise of harmonious life. Thanks for listening.

UPC: 666561013615
Label: Constellation
Release Date: 9.14.18
Format: Vinyl