Drag City
2008
An Optimist Notes The Dusk
About This Album
We haven't heard a full-length from David Grubbs the solo artist in a little more than four years; he's spent his time issuing the odd EP here and there, appearing with Red Krayola, and making guest appearances on others recordings. An Optimist Notes the Dusk contains six tracks that clock in at a bit over 37 minutes, and the Grubbs on display here is the writer of art songs rather than the rampant free-form experimentalist, with one exception: "Not So Distant," the album's final and longest cut. For most of this set, Grubbs relies on his idiosyncratic sense of melody and accompanies himself on guitar with a drum kit on three cuts and a muted trumpet on two others. His songwriting, while it may look conventional on the surface, such as on "Gethsemani Night" which opens the set, is far from it. There are verses and choruses, but the arrangement of melody in some hummable fashion is absent here. In fact, Grubbs plays a gentle but pointillistic lyric line on his six-string, using off-kilter breaks in his tentative expressionist narrative to achieve the feeling of a skeletal tone poem whenever Nate Wooley's muted trumpet enters the mix. Open-tuned strings offer minor-key and shadowed reflections to commence "An Optimist Declines," when drummer Michael Evans enters, it feels almost like a creeping, halting duet between Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and drummer Steve Shelley, with some straining organ and modal power chords to take it out over the course of seven minutes.
Track List (try tracks 1,2 and 6)

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