#plainspeak

Buck Meek — The Mirror (4AD)

The Mirror is Big Thief guitarist Buck Meek’s second album for 4AD, and his fourth overall. Arriving on the back of the sixth Big Thief album, last year’s disappointing Double Infinity, Meek has brought bandmate James Krivchenia on board as producer. As a result, The Mirror sounds fantastic, and all of the playing among Meek’s bandmates is fluid and dynamic, smouldering with inspiration and the conviviality of a free-flowing jam session among close friends. It’s also great to hear Meek firing off some of his characteristically idiosyncratic guitar solos. Musically there’s a lot to love. The downside of The Mirror is the same issue that hampered Meek’s last album, Haunted Mountain — sappy lyrics, such as “Making words up while we made love” on lead single and opening track “Gasoline,” or “I’ve seen angels fly every night above our bed” on “Ring of Fire.” Though these lyrical misfires don’t completely sour the experience, they do cast doubt on Meek’s creative acuity.

Tim Clarke

Microplastique — Many Roads (Irritable Mystic)

Many Roads is, as you might suppose from its title, a document of a tour. But it’s not a Jackson Browne/Bob Seger reproduction of mirror gazing; the focus is on the music, not its makers. During the summer of 2025 the Chicago-based quartet, which is led by percussion and composer Adam Shead, played 15 dates around the Midwest. The album is drawn from six of them. It's a rare thing for an improvisation-oriented combo on the bottom end of the food chain to get that many gigs in a short period of time. The charge of getting deeper into the music together enhances its pre-existing playfulness, which one can hear on the album they released a year ago. On Many Roads, their flute-forward, percussion-dense music evokes Afro-conscious ensembles from back in the day (Art Ensemble of Chicago, Don Cherry,) and merges it with toy piano-prizing new music and the sort of circus sounds you might hear in some Fellini movie. They combine it all with a sense of restraint that attests to the group's shared sense of purpose.

Bill Meyer

Monkious — Straight With Chaser (JACC)

Canon meets unbridled invention on Straight With Chaser. The Monkious is a 2/3 Portuguese, 1/3 German trio that includes drummer Philipp Ernsting, double bassist Gonçalo Almeida and electric guitarist Marcelo Dos Reis. Their method is implied by the album title and explicated in the credits. Basically, they play Monk’s tunes off the cliff into open air and then, like denizens of a Loony Tunes cartoon, skedaddle on suddenly too fast to see limbs until they alight once more upon a familiar outcropping of Monk. Dos Reis handles both the melodic declarations and the blurriest rushes and he owes the other two musicians thanks for their diligent efforts keep him from suffering Wile E. Coyote’s fate. Almeida is the guy who always keeps ahold of that one tree branch sticking out from the rock’s face and extends a strong grip that yanks the guitarist back onto land. Ernsting, on the other hand, seems to flex open space itself, bending the very air so that Dos Reis can slip off of its contours. Yeah, this is a fun one.

Bill Meyer

Frank Morelli — From the Soul (Musica Solis)

The bassoon gets a bad rap in popular culture, associated with cartoon sobs and laugh tracks in a rom-com, but make no mistake: in the right hands, the instrument is anything but the soundtrack’s sidekick. Vivaldi knew it and wrote dozens of concertos for bassoon, and Stravinsky starts The Rite of Spring with a strangled cry in the instrument’s upper register. In From the Soul, bassoonist Frank Morelli leans into legato, smoothly navigating recent contemporary classical compositions. Joined by pianist Wei-Yi Yang on Jeff Scott’s “Elegy for Innocence,” he plays both quicksilver runs and impassioned melodies with impressive control, the finale building to a sequence of virtuoso turns that glisten with intensity. Bassoon and solo voice is a rare combination, but Lori Laitman’s “I Never Saw Another Butterfly” suggests it can be a good one. Janna Baty sings with a rich sound that balances well with Morelli’s tone. A transcription of an aria by Dominic Argento reminds one that bassoonists routinely deal with adapted works. Wynton Marsalis’s “Meeiaan” features the Callisto String Quartet in a piece embodied with the composer’s interest in early jazz and blues. There is a playful cast to much of the music here, but the performance is earnest in a way that no soundtrack cliché ever approaches. The recording finishes with another bassoon and piano piece, “Prayer,” by Nirmali Fenn, in which the writing is more dissonant and Morelli is given the opportunity to display some of the extended techniques at the instrument’s disposal. Hearing both ends of the spectrum, the Fenn following the Marsalis piece, underscores the bassoon’s capacity, especially in the hands of a player like Morelli, to contain multitudes.

Christian Carey

PlainsPeak — Someone To Someone (Irrabagast)

Let’s make this plain from the outset — PlainsPeak is a band of Midwestern-located musicians led by saxophone generalist (although he sticks to alto here) Jon Irabagon. As is often the case with players who teach at the university level, he’s moved around a bit, and most recently has been in Chicago. Irabagon’s accompanists on Someone To Someone are mostly associated with the Calligram label. They have all made a commitment to gig steadily and are comfortable diverging from mainstream jazz fundamentals. That translates into music that never lets go of a swinging foundation and operates comfortably within defined, song-related structures (some titled with Chicago-centric humor), but finds within these frameworks many opportunities to wax creatively deft and expressive. Particularly impressive are the moments when trumpeter Chuck Johnson and Irabagon jointly engage in simultaneous soloing over rhythms that surge like a Lake Michigan swells on a stormy day.

Bill Meyer

Ned Rothenberg — Looms & Legends (Pyroclastic)

Regardless of the diversities imposed by genre and individual intention, every solo performance of conviction sends one common message; this music is complete. Reeds player Ned Rothenberg delivers the whole shebang on his first solo record in a dozen years. Across its fourteen tracks he plays alto saxophone, shakuhachi, and Bb and A clarinets, wielding each with a technical assurance so strong that it’s easy to overlook. You’re likely to notice other things first, like the open-ended logic of “How You Slice It,” on which a pondering clarinet melody gives way to an unbroken, circular-breathing-powered perambulation that invests high-pitched multiphonics and adroit redirections with emotional heft. Or there’s the titrated celebration conveyed by the intervallic leaps on the ultra-compact “Brief Tall Tale.” The record ends with a version of “’Round Midnight” played on shakuhachi, which might sound like a novelty gambit, but actually sounds authentically felt and true.

Bill Meyer

Alan Sparhawk — Alan Sparhawk Solo Band (Sub Pop)

Anybody seeing Alan Sparhawk play live last year would have heard most of his two recent LPs, White Roses, My Godand Alan Sparhawk With Trampled By Turtles, as well as a range of material from older projects and even a cover or two. Now, using the same kind of naming convention as his last album (and giving shine to his band on that tour, his son Cyrus on bass and Eric Pollard on drums), he rounds up two of the newest tracks they played. There’s a pretty sharp distinction between the A and B sides, but both are responding to the current state of the world. “JCMF” has an incandescent rage that hearkens back to “Pretty People” from Low’s 2007 Drums and Guns, except louder. The set-ending, David Lynch-inspired “No More Darkness,” in contrast, is almost a lullaby.

Ian Mathers

Greg Weeks — If the Sun Dies (Language of Stone)

Greg Weeks is perhaps best known for playing alongside Dusted favorite Meg Baird in the psych-folk collective Espers. Released on his own Language of Stone label, If the Sun Dies is Weeks’ fifth solo album — and it’s an absolute cracker. Steeped in reflective melancholy, these 11 songs strike a consistent tone that allows one track to bleed into another seamlessly, especially going from “The Heathen Heart” into “A Narrow Star” during the album’s first half. The core instruments of Weeks’ acoustic guitar and voice, plus Jess Sparhawk on bass and Ben McConnell on drums, map out a slowly unfurling, misty terrain. At times the music sounds like it’s going to collapse completely, especially on “Tail Lights Burn the Hillside Red,” where each player is almost challenging the others to play even slower. Indeed, if the guitars were distorted, the album could almost be doom-metal, or at the very least slowcore. Counterbalancing the suffocating weight there’s some lovely psychedelic flourishes on Mellotron, fuzz guitar and organ, and on the slightly more upbeat songs, such as the title track and “Gone Darkside,” there’s a perceptible spring in the band’s step. Not surprising when the core songwriting and commitment to tone are so impressive and affecting.

Tim Clarke

Susumu Yokota — The Boy and the Tree (Skintone Records/Lo Recordings)

The latest entry in the Susumu Yokota reissue campaign, The Boy and the Tree couldn’t be more different from its predecessor, Will. In his Dusted review, Ian Mathers highlighted Will’s “joyful sense of playfulness.” That album’s firm grounding in danceable, jazzy house music makes it distinct from The Boy and the Tree’s icy, unsettling restraint. Supposedly inspired by a visit to Japanese world heritage site Yakushima Island and the anime movie Princess Mononoke, the musical elements featured here, such as woody and metallic percussion, and vocal and guitar snippets, are handled in such a clinical manner that the overall effect ends up unnerving and faintly sinister. The instrumental ingredients are deployed sparingly but repeated through digital delay, like specimens trapped under microscope slides. Titles such as “Fairy Link” and “Secret Garden” suggest wandering through a benign enchanted environment, but “Plateau on Plateau” and “Blood on Snow” offer clues that the atmosphere of these tracks is more than meets the ear... The Boy and the Tree is a hall of mirrors to lose yourself in — misleadingly simple but disarmingly uncanny.