If you hadn’t heard anything from Jon DeRosa in a while, he might not be the most obvious pick to collaborate with Stephin Merritt. After losing hearing one ear, DeRosa formed (the mostly solo) Aarktica to channel the aural hallucinations he was experiencing, and under that name specialized mostly in beautifully drifting soundscapes, although through the years he also proved to be a capable songwriter in more conventional molds with songs like Aura Lee and Hollow Earth Theory.
The latter provides the most obvious connection between his work as Aarktica and his officially solo material, appearing both on the former’s last LP to date In Sea as well as his first LP under his own name, 2012’s A Wolf in Preacher’s Clothes.
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The latter version was a bit warmer and sweeter, but mostly revealed how skilled DeRosa has gotten at blending the various facets of his musical life (ambient/drone, including studying with La Monte Young, post punk, 1960s pop, Americana) together.
Which brings us to Merritt; DeRosa worked with him on the opera The Peach Blossom Fan and here co-writes “When Daddy Took the Treehouse Down.” That song is about as ideal a midpoint between the two men’s work as you could imagine, meaning that you could imagine it fitting in perfectly on Realism even as DeRosa gives it a different shading than Merritt could. If that collaboration attracts any fans of more conventional songcraft to Black Halo it will have been worth it just for that, the quality of the song aside, because this collection confidently presents itself as one of the peaks of DeRosa’s long and varied career.
The opening “Fool’s Razor” makes clear just how much DeRosa is channeling the crooning pop of yesteryear, even as the subject matter keeps the song inextricably current (not that the singers of the past never pondered existential questions, but they generally didn’t come right out and sing “what does anything mean? I have no answers”). The dark swoon of the backing strings and DeRosa’s deep, clear baritone makes for a lushly seductive opening, and while that is the register that much of Black Halo works in, DeRosa excels on the more varied songs.
The core and peak of the album is the trio of “Give Me One More Reason”, “Coyotes”, and “Dancing in a Dream”. The first is a surprisingly wiry, somehow minimalist, Wall of Sound slow burner. It turns its title into a demand for justification for both self-destruction and resisting self-destruction, spinning into the most soaringly romantic song on the album, where DeRosa intones “fill your lungs/flood the stars/with joy and sorrow/like wild coyotes/bear your soul/kill the pain/and fall in love again/like wild coyotes” with a power and control that paradoxically makes the track seem even more wild. “Coyotes” would be hard song for most albums to follow up, but with songwriting/singing assistance from Carina Round (whose backing vocals are excellent throughout the album), the darkly pretty “Dancing in a Dream” (which works equally well as a “Will the Night”-style ballad of separation as it does as the best song about a loved one dying since “Paint It, Black”) does so ably.
There’s plenty more to Black Halo, from the seance-as-metaphor-for-isolation dirge “Knock Once” to the sun-blasted “High & Lonely”, but that center would be enough to recommend it. Throughout DeRosa’s experience shows in his tight command of lyrical, sonic, and emotional themes, with Charles Newman’s rich production tying everything together. DeRosa has plenty of excellent work in his oeuvre already, but he can be proud of Black Halo; on merit, it should introduce him to a whole new audience.