320 kbps|100 MB| UL|UA FLAC|248 MB| UL
Zachary Cale’s last album, 2013’s excellent Blue Rider, was an exercise in sparseness as expansion. The record centered on Cale’s voice and finger-picked guitar, with a few flourishes here and there. But the spare sounds echoed out into vast space around them, making them larger, presenting isolation not as a limitation or a way to be closed off but rather as an expansion, even an extension of the self.
That record, as its title implies, was about a traveler on a personal journey. Cale’s new record, and first for the No Quarter label, is called Duskland, and the title hints at changes right away. Here, the focus is on a destination, but a liminal one. It is neither fully dark nor blazed in light. It’s also an album that stretches out into many voices, many perspectives. Though the songs still contain Cale’s knack for a bittersweet phrase, these songs have a sense of the surreal to them. The travelers in these songs seem lost in the landscapes around them. The lines between viewer and what’s viewed get blurred. On smoldering opener “Sundowner”, the narrator is bathed in the light of a “crimson moon” and reaches their hands up into the sky as if they might become one with it. “Basilica”, a beautiful instrumental in the middle of the record, seems to reach out into the corners and dark places of the titular space as if to become coated in its history, as if to glean something from the building’s survival of time.