Accompany

2000年代半ば以降インディー・ロックの中心的存在であるCotton Jones、Page France、Michael Nau & The Mighty Threadでフロントマンとして活躍してきたMichael Nauによるソロアルバム。ドライでパンチの効いたドラム、みずみずしいシンセ・ライン、センス良く動詞を散りばめたヴォーカル・プロダクションなど、サイケ・ソウルからの影響が感じられます。スイープなストリングス・アレンジとフレンチ・ホーンを使った曲や、スライド・ギターとシャッフルするスネア・ドラムが心地よい曲など幅の広い楽曲を作り上げています。

Following the band-backed Less Ready to Go (2019) and self-released one-man outing So On So On (2020), Accompany finds Michael Nau back in a collaborative setting after the latter album and a few years without "much of a plan." What changed that was producer/engineer Adrian Olsen (the Head and the Heart, Fruit Bats, Lucy Dacus) reaching out to invite Nau to record something together at his Richmond, Virginia studio. With sessions scheduled, Nau wrote some songs and put together a band consisting of longtime studio and/or touring collaborators, including vocalist Whitney McGraw, keyboardist Will Brown, and multi-instrumentalists Seth Kauffman (Ray LaMontagne, Angel Olsen), Mat Davidson (Twain, Langhorne Slim, Big Thief), and Ken Woodward (Twain, Buck Meek) as well as Olsen. His full-length debut for Karma Chief Records, the resulting Accompany was essentially recorded live in the studio as a band. Although Naus music has always been known for a reflective, "dreamy" countenance, Accompany settles into a consistently blurry, midtempo bearing thats particularly lost in thought and memory. Helping this perception along are impressionistic lyrics that capture feelings and experiences without necessarily naming them. A song like the Carole King-evoking "Shiftshaping" epitomizes this effect with its sometimes indistinguishable wash of strings, synthesizers, guitar noodling, and ghostly backing vocals adding dense atmosphere to more in-focus piano and vocals whose lyrics are concerned with emerging from a period of sleep and forgetfulness. Other songs, like the jaunty highlight "Painting a Wall," regretful opener (or does it just sound regretful?) "Sharp Diamonds," and the nostalgic "Relearn to Boogie," lean heavily into floaty steel guitars or, in the case of the latter, vibraphone. Even relatively lucid entries like "And So On" and the organ-centric "Comes to Pour," with their relatively crisp rhythm sections, are set against a backdrop of reverb and sustain. Its an especially dreamy -- and seductive -- album and one that seems to find comfort in collaboration. ~ Marcy Donelson