Brandon Seabrook, a guitar and banjo virtuoso, is about as unique an improviser as contemporary music has produced. His music can be whimsical and edgy, often at the same time. There is plenty of beauty and atmosphere in his tiny string symphonies, but they are rarely designed to sustain a single luxurious mood. Appalachian textures flirt with metal, and electronic cinemascapes are in bed with modern jazz.
His new album, Hellbent Daydream, is one of his best, using a quartet that also includes bass, violin, and keyboards to paint a set of musical canvases that snarl and delight, wink and even sometimes seduce. Words may not be up to the task of fully describing this music, but no one-minute audio excerpt would be better. Each performance evolves to include rich sections, composed or improvised, that are both rich and evocative.
“Existential Banger Infinite Ceiling”, for example, is a piece of atmospheric chamber music that gradually and logically morphs, suggesting a scene from a modern suspense film. Elias Stemeseder’s piano drops dark, low chords, high chimes, and harmonically ambiguous clusters in conversation with Seabrook’s electric guitar, while violinist Erica Dicker plays dramatic written lines. If Hitchcock had played the violin… The track sounds nearly through-composed but utterly elastic.
In contrast, “Autopsied Cloudburst”, despite its imagistic title, proceeds as a delightfully improvised track with a central lick, played variously by all the instruments, holding it together. That lick, which spins in on itself like a jig or reel, moves through a set of chords like a jazz figure, and Seabrook has his way with it on both clean-toned and distorted electric guitar. At the mid-point, the tempo melts away, and the band shifts into a set of reverberating chimes that mimic the clearing of the sky after the action of the song’s title.
Brandon Seabrook’s most distinctive fame in New York’s creative scene is how he unleashes the banjo as a wild musical tool. On Hellbent Dream, we also get a healthy dose of the instrument deployed more conventionally. “Bespattered Bygones” starts with Seabrook in bluegrass mode, the group sounding like a conventional string band. The banjo and fiddle stay in an idiomatically standard conversation for a while before the harmonies press at the edge of convention, bowed bass entering, and then a flutey synthesizer. The music takes on a whimsical, circus-like harmonic color, with fiddle and synth winding around each other, creating the music for a psychedelic carousel. It’s dizzying and addictive.
“The Arkansas Tattler” begins even more like a slice of Americana, with a banjo pattern layered over fiddle and synth lines that mimic a penny whistle. A nice unaccompanied acoustic bass solo from Henry Fraser eventually brings the rest of the band back in a skittering and free cluster, like insects swarming around a porch light. Again, Seabrook keeps his listener off balance, but charmingly so.
My two favorite tracks on Hellbent Daydream, tellingly I think, could not be more different. “Name Dropping Is the Lowest Form of Conversation, Waltz” is a wonder of precise performance and imaginative composition, rather in the mode of Frank Zappa. The band wakes up with a set of Mr. Rogers-sounding keyboard chimes, launching into a lively guitar waltz that spins like a child’s toy, gaining colors and textures along the way. Brandon Seabrook switches tone on a whim, conjuring Bill Frisell-ian jazz and chamber-style minimalism, then shifting back into a whimsical dance. Will he next bring in a heavily distorted guitar solo because that is now what you least expect?
“I’m a Nightmare and You Know It” appeals differently. While it also conjures contrasting textures, it uses a central lick to allow Seabrook’s guitar, Dicker’s violin, and Stemeseder’s piano to trade improvised phrases and take longer improvised solos. This track balances the sense that Seabrook is leading a band that thrives in the moment with the construction of a set of tracks that serve as soundtracks to the movies in his mind.
As a guitar/banjo player, Brandon Seabrook is pan-stylistic to the point of disappearing within his shifts of tone, texture, and phrasing. Unlike some musicians who range across genres but wind up improvising as if they were trained in jazz, Seabrook adapts his phrasing and attack to the purpose of each song or section. He layers different instruments within the compositions, orchestrating both himself and the band.
In a sense, the quartet here disappears within itself too. At times, each instrument pops out of the blend in a featured moment (improvised or simple in the written orchestration), but just as often your ears don’t differentiate the violin and synthesizer, the banjo and piano, the bass and who knows what. It isn’t a trick but the nature of Seabrook’s enterprise on Hellbent Daydream. It is, after all, a dreamscape, and the logic of dreams is evoked. Not everything is what it seems, and one event bleeds into the next without connections that seem fully conscious.
That is what I like so much about this album. Also, that this sleepy vibrance is so often clear and beautiful. Brandon Seabrook’s Hellbent Daydream has a crisp, ringing sound more often than it seems woozy or impressionistic. It suggests the logic of dreams with a musical precision that is more caffeinated than gauzy.
These are, yup, daydreams. I can’t get their originality and precision out of my head.