The musically adventurous Virginia-based multi-instrumentalist and builder of drones Daniel Bachman has returned with another masterful album, When The Roses Come Again, which is out now on vinyl (standard black, limited red), compact disc, and digital through Three Lobed Recordings. The record continues Bachman’s expansive questing across 15 pieces that unfurl with a glorious interconnected flow. The unified progressions thrive on discipline and clarity of vision, and Bachman has once again cut one of the best records of its year.
Circa 2012-’13, when Daniel Bachman’s two excellent albums for Tomkins Square (Seven Pines and Jesus I’m a Sinner) were released, he was pretty easily described as a fingerpicker in the American Primitive tradition. His arrival on the scene was part of a sustained resurgence in Guitar Soli, just another welcome surprise in a style that few would have predicted would be successfully embraced by a younger generation of musicians.
Like a few American Primitive players including the originator of the form John Fahey, Bachman has migrated away from straight picking, and on When The Roses Come Again he largely sets the guitar aside for drones and extensive, at times collage-like editing of solo improvisational recordings that in his essay for the album, Jerry David DeCicca’s calls a week’s worth of 8-hour a day excursions emanating from a cabin on the border of Shenandoah National Park.
Bachman’s move into the abstract has certainly realigned his fanbase, but perhaps not as much as one might initially suspect, and that’s mainly through focus and determination. Instead of meandering, When The Roses Come Again is at times unnervingly in its intensity, and it’s all the more powerful through concision. That’s to be expected from the drones, as Bachman has grown increasingly adept as harnessing sustained tension, but it’s also heard in those edited improvs, which were assembled by cutting and pasting and altering speed and pitch on a laptop.
Bachman uses the tools at hand, with no anxiety over computers and telephone drum apps, and then fashions a few of his own, which includes stripping the frets off a banjo and sanding it down in pursuit of new sounds and building his own Appalachian mouthbow from a manual. Sharing it’s title with a Carter Family tune (its lyrics titling the individual pieces here), When The Roses Come Again is a fascinating blend of new and old, and it hits a late highpoint in “All their sadness tuned to gladness” by referencing a sound once representing the new that’s now considered old hat (it feels like a spoiler to give it away).
Other than some harmonium and handbells from Tyler Magill, Bachman plays everything on When The Roses Come Again. That the drones recall such avant mainstays as Terry Riley and Henry Flynt is to be expected based on Bachman’s last few albums, but the final track “Now the roses come again,” utilizing that drum app, actually cozies up to minimalist techno. The album is yet another rousing success for Bachman in a discography full of gems.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
