Give the mind a crumb of story and it’ll spin a tale, even in the absence of explicit narrative. This tendency proves true with Eli Winter’s new self-titled album, a six-track instrumental odyssey driven by virtuosic guitar. With ambling compositions that are as evocative as they are refined, it’s easy to imagine some lone traveler, cycling from defeat to resolve and back again. On this, his sixth record after this year’s Controlled Burning with Jordan Reyes and 2021’s Anticipation with Cameron Knowler, Winter transports the listener to a cerebral landscape as dynamic and storied as American topography.
Here, the Chicago-based wunderkind—an accomplished writer with storytelling bonafides beyond the guitar—merges the mythos of his native Texas with jazzy, explosive bombast, like a cowboy on DMT. He’s joined by a who’s-who of musicians at the intersection of tradition and experimentation: Knowler, Yasmin Williams, Ryley Walker, jaimie branch, David Grubbs, and Tyler Damon, among others. This roster might feel crowded if it weren’t full of career collaborators, practiced in subtlety and harmony. The resulting songs are dimensional and rich, but never baroque. The guitar remains at the fore, even as distortion (as on “No Fear”) or brass (“Dayenu”) lends additional dimension.
They’re also emotionally resonant—the deft finger-picking on opener “For a Chisos Bluebonnet” feels like wind in the sails, fortifying and hopeful, while closer “Unbecoming” builds from austere harmonium into a looping, bittersweet melody, wistful as the Texas plains. These songs are spiritual and sonic cousins to William Tyler’s “Highway Anxiety,” music of and for journeying (even if it’s just a trip through the psyche). “Dayenu,” with its fevered percussion and flugelhorn, crests to a frenzied climax that ends like a cliffhanger, playing as much with time and pace as with tone. Winter moves from fluid, honky-tonk rhythms to the precipice of abstraction, turning over the sunny familiar to see what writhes underneath.
That searching emotional current feels more potent in certain moments than others, and it’s alluded to directly in the titles of “Dayenu” and “Davening in Threes,” which reference Jewish prayer. The quest for meaning takes on varying degrees of urgency. “Brain on Ice,” with its slide guitar and languid tempo is a pleasant listen, but it doesn’t have the same impact as the songs that bookend it, which feel satisfying and textured, like massaging a scar. “Davening in Threes” feels mildly indulgent by its end, close to noodling, but charms with a freewheeling riff that circles layers of warm, reverberating chords. What it evokes—emotionally or narratively—will depend on who’s listening, but in this melange of past and present, beautiful and dissonant, the space for discovery is as wide as the horizon.
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