#mark nelson

That’s perhaps in line with Nelson’s statement that he wrote these songs about travel. He says he means both ordinary, physical travel (of the “get in the van, man” variety) as well as more metaphorical life journeys. Still, you have to sense the balance tipping towards the mystical when three of the ten track titles refer to the afterlife (and four if you count “Taxi to the Terminal Gate”). This last one is full of long, lucid sounds, some breathy and organic and wood wind like, others polished to an electronic gleam; a subtly clicking, scratching rhythm ticks on through all this, as water washes through in big splashes.

Mallory Linnehan, who performs as Chelsea Bridge, is the only other musician besides Nelson on this album. You can hear her violin in “Silver Plane, Now Boarding,” a mournful, Celtic skirl, rough as wool against the pristine hyper-reality of the guitar and electronics.  Her voice turns up in “Death Cleaning” alongside Nelson’s in a lovely murmuring interval, introspective and dream-like.

Yet it is mostly Nelson, pushing past his normal slow-blooming, guitar atmospherics into a lighter, brighter, more electric future. It is mostly pretty subtle, but effective at higher doses, too, as in the punching, rolling, Talk Talk-by-way-of-Adrian-Sherwood, “Entrance to Afterlife.” It sure doesn’t sound like Pan•American, but oh boy, it moves.