Drag City (Caroline)
2004
A Guess at the Riddle
About This Album
On A Guess at the Riddle, David Grubbs reunites with his Rickets & Scurvy collaborator Rick Moody, and once again, folk and folk-rock form the backbone of the pair's elliptically literate songs. In a way that parallels the career of his former Gastr del Sol mate Jim O'Rourke, Grubbs' solo work remains balanced between experimentalism and pop, although he doesn't always explore both sides of his music on each of his releases. Though there's nothing on A Guess at the Riddle that's as immediately ingratiating as Rickets & Scurvy's "Transom" (although the sweet "One Way Out of the Maze" comes close), on this album Grubbs clearly enjoys taking his listeners into the nooks and crannies, as well as the open spaces of his music, while remaining rooted in relatively traditional, song-oriented material. The first half of A Guess at the Riddle is so straightforward, in fact, that listeners waiting for songs like "Knight Errant" and the Mayo Thompson-penned "Magnificence as Such" to get weird will miss out on their down-to-earth loveliness. The musical simplicity of these songs provides a foil to their lyrical complexity; even the lyrics Moody didn't have a hand in writing are still extremely literary.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,5 and 11)

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