Eternal Repeater by Charlie Kaplan

Take a cheap delay pedal and turn the feedback knob all the way to the right. Play a single note, or not; with the right pedal, just the hum of the pickups and the incidental noises of your hands on the guitar will be enough to get the portal opening. Everything that passes through the pedal’s circuitry gets caught in a loop, repeating and repeating again until the end of time, or at least until you kick the thing off. The resulting accumulation, in the right headspace, can come to seem like a transmission from a faraway plane.

Charlie Kaplan had this effect in mind when he titled his third album Eternal Repeater. The album never explicitly indulges in the oldest trick in the psychedelic noisemaker’s book, but it’s still an apt choice, both musically and thematically. Where Kaplan’s previous albums focused on his precision-engineered pop songcraft, with the faintest hints of endless jams happening on the other side of the portal, Eternal Repeater is situated a little more closely to that alternate dimension. His songs have a newfound sense of expanse and emphasis on shimmering instrumental interplay, sometimes coming across like a vocal-led take on William Tyler’s kosmiche Americana and others like Big Star if they’d stuck around long enough to be influenced by Television. The lyrics too, deal with patterns of repetition that could go on forever if left unchecked. Across the album, Kaplan addresses the shadowy side of human nature, charting what happens when selfishness and fear of the unknown turn from individual impulses into societal currents, gathering force as they ripple outward.

Kaplan recruited a crack ensemble to realize the swirling visions of his new songs: his Office Culture bandmate Winston Cook-Wilson on keys, Ben Wagner on drums, Frank Meadows of Fust and Tomberlin on bass, Kaplan himself on rhythm guitar, and Andrew Daly Frank on lead guitar. Take your pick of great guitar duos to which to compare the latter two: on the windows-down road trip of “Edie Got Away,” there are whiffs of Keith Richards and Mick Taylor; on the climactic final section of “Mescarole,” Frank plays like the firebreathing Nels Cline to Kaplan’s easy-riding Jeff Tweedy. Kaplan’s earlier records garnered high accolades from jam-friendly tastemakers like the beloved psychedelic radio DJ Jeff Conklin and the Beyond the Pond podcast, whose hosts named his debut Sunday one of the best albums of 2020. Anyone who enjoyed the more exploratory sides of that record and last year’s Country Life in America should prepare for Eternal Repeater to bowl them over.

Kaplan was inspired to write much of the album’s material by “the spooky dark space that happens when a psychedelic English musician instead picks up an acoustic guitar”: he cites Pink Floyd’s quietly triumphant “Fearless” and the work of Nick Drake as particular touchstones. “Sun Come Up,” the opening track, immediately signals the new direction: a solo acoustic guitar instrumental that intermingles portends of doom and flickers of hope; it could pass for a lost recording from Bert Jansch’s Rosemary Lane sessions. But Eternal Repeater isn’t all paisley and English mist. Kaplan’s songwriting remains tight and muscular, even as he’s stretching out. He has a knack for melodies that are familiar and surprising at once, and chord changes that hit you with pungent dissonance just as you’re expecting sweet resolution or vice versa. In a catalog already filled with skewed pop gold, “Feeling Alright” ranks as one of Kaplan’s catchiest and most ingenious songs, with a menacing two-chord vamp and a tune that soars with no regard for the discontent churning beneath it. The composition smartly mirrors lyrics about getting high and escaping briefly from a world that wants to bring you down.

“Cloudburst” achieves a similar holism through different means, with chords that shift and cycle around a simple repeated bass line, painting its four notes in a slightly different watercolor shade with each bleary turn of the progression. The words, which Kaplan wrote during the pandemic lockdown, address a world in motion and stasis at once. “Morning, evening, weaving all in one,” Kaplan sings with serenity touched by faint unease. “Call me in the morning and I’ll pick up right away/Reading in the paper how it all just stopped today.”

All of Eternal Repeater’s songs deal in their own ways with cycles that seem impossible to escape, however large or small. “Mescarole” begins with an accidentally spilled beer then spirals into violence real or imagined, a conflict doomed to escalate by alcohol and adrenaline, with Frank’s blazing guitar solo embodying its final conflagration. The gravitational pull of charisma tugs on interpersonal relationships in “Everyone Calling Your Name” and shifts society itself in “Idiot” and “Now That I’m Older,” two extended jams whose Dylanesque associative lyrics are haunted by the populist right-wing presence in contemporary politics. The punkish album closer “In a Little Bit of Time” is the rowdiest song in Kaplan’s catalog, providing Eternal Repeater with a sort of moral conclusion with its tale of a demagogue facing eventual comeuppance. Viewed from a certain angle, the album seems to tell a single continuous story, starting with small-scale clashes of ego and insecurity and following their reverberations as far as they’ll go.

With its sharp social commentary delivered via pristine hooks and scorching jams, Eternal Repeater is dense with ideas but never pedantic or preachy. Kaplan is as thoroughly swept up in these currents as the rest of us, just perceptive and curious enough to make note of what he sees and convey it through song. Even in the album’s darkest moments, the irrepressible good nature at the heart of his music—the quality that helped Sunday’s meditations on grief feel somehow optimistic, and Country Life’s recollections of youth feel universal despite their particularity—shines through. The empathy of his writing and delivery implies a way out of the endless cycle: by choosing to resist your basest impulses and actively choosing compassion.

Kaplan’s most adventurous and ambitious album is an ideal starting point for new fans; and for old ones, a next step that’s both intuitive and unexpected, just like the twists of his melodies. If you have to brave the stormy weather of American life in the 2020s, you might as well travel with a companion like this one.
- Andy Cush

I'm an independent songwriter.