“DD Review: Randy Randall – Arthur King Presents Randy Randall- Sound Field Volume One.”

Score: 7/10

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From the way it looks, all of those “releases” listed on Bandcamp are just individual songs, or snippets of songs, and this sole Spotify “album” selection ergo qualifies as the solo debut of No Age’s guitarist Randy Randall.
And I, for one, am sitting here listening to it at 4:17 p.m. on a Sunday, letting these tender, fragile and languid guitar tones seep into my ear drums, about to go to work (Sundays are always chill) after having slept 12 hours with eight beers, two packs of pizza rolls and a pack of pepperoni pizza Hot Pockets in me. The sun is shining through the window on a cold, clear day in my hardwood-floored house share (apartment-style) in central Terre Haute, Indiana. I catch a reflection of my eye in my Android phone on which I’m listening to this and I mean I don’t wanna say life seems BEAUTIFUL, I mean that could be the beer talking, although considering it was all Busch Light and Milwaukee’s Best Light that’d be pretty funny, wouldn’t it.
K, the primary reference point for this ambient guitar work would be Pink Floyd’s last album, which was instrumental, or, it’s like the sonic cusp, or upper fulcrum, of “Take it Back”-era Pink Floyd, salad days Dire Straits or Big Head Todd and the Monsters. Similar to Yellow Swans or Oneohtrix Point Never, these songs stretch out ambiently and are minimalistic and tone-based, relying on no percussion to state their identities.
By and large, most of the guitar blueprints laid down here, though opaque and long-lasting, certainly tend to be monochromatic and steady, the first undulations of any kind coming “Suburban Morning Pt. 1,” the third track and first half of the second of four two-song, separately titled sections, which make up the album’s whole eight tracks (“Desert Sunrise”; “Suburban Morning”; “City Noon”; “Shore Sunset”). A similar titling and arranging format comes in Nivhek’s excellent After its own death / Walking in a spiral towards the house of earlier this year, the idea of each separate thought or artistic cell requiring more than one mood, or song, to make its reality shown. Another thing I gather just from Randall’s titles he’s selected for this project, is that they mark in their own way a journey from east to west through LA, so that along with being geographically specific in this way it could actually theoretically be meant to embody a journey MADE BY the sun, as if interpolating the artist’s muse into that solar body. “City Noon” comes in to open side by with commendable textural plurality (one particular tone which seems to straddle the territory between a sound’s actual body and a lake of gentle distortion and then the overlay of that British-inspired classic rock lead guitar work), the song then peppering some ominous minor chords but perhaps not really enough vituperation to embody a strong statement of such kind the way Julia Holter’s Loud City Song from 2013 bent toward.

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