Feel Free by PENN BRYCE

"My first experience with the new Penn Bryce album Feel Free was as a single forty five-minute audio file, unburdened by track breaks or song titles. While the context provided by those features is a necessary link in this chain, the music works well as a continuous, anonymous flow, drifting between lyrical meditations in currents of what is now known as ambient or "cosmic" country - music that is in dialogue with the roots of Americana as well as the celestial graspings of psychedelia. In fact, the song titles and lyrics provide some foundation for my initial impression, as they appeal to both the otherworldly and the mundane, evoking that permanent sense of confusion - the feeling that the really real is just beyond the reach of our perception - that most of us humans spend our lives trying to ignore.

The meander of the work here, and the way in which I first absorbed it as an extended suite rather than as discrete songs, recalls two other things for me, beyond the basic world of chemically enhanced country music - first is the previous Penn Bryce release, "Seconds", a lengthy fourteen minute single that moves through a variety of zones from throw-back psych-pop to neo-soul, presaging the territory covered here. The second thing I am reminded of is modern hip-hop production, where songs often have a tectonic shift in the middle of them, revealing a different world of sounds and rhythms in their second half, with subtle sonic and literal themes to unite the two.

Hip-hop is a relevant touchstone for Feel Free on multiple levels - structurally, as I have pointed out, but also in the fact that the person behind PB is an Atlanta-based recording engineer who has worked on many hip-hop records - some household names - and those sounds and techniques have seeped deeply into their studio playbook. A listener coming from a place of rock'n'roll could be forgiven for not getting this at first, but it becomes obvious by the time the resigned societal downer "Their Name, Your Name" comes on - the autotuned vocal and back-beat dynamics blend seamlessly here with the guitars that are just a little too wet and slow to be Nashville chicken-pickin' style. To blend country and hip-hop has become mainstream, as evidenced by a half-a-dozen blockbuster albums from this past year, but on Feel Free it's a lot more like The Dead mingling with Outkast than the party bangers of Nelly being grafted onto the sound of Brooks & Dunn. These rap/soul/pop elements resurface across Feel Free as if from the oceanic depths sung of in the shipwrecked lyrics of "Weird Things", cutting like the prow of a ghost ship through drifts of guitar haze ("Quantum Lensing", "Quantum Tunneling") and fucked-up elevator music shuffle ("Shake a Tower [Benedictio Locus]") when they re-emerge in the album's call-back closer, "Connexion Reprise".

What do these parts sum up to then, what was the underlying thing I heard when I first pressed play on that forty five minute audio file? My impression was perhaps colored a bit by conversations I have had with PB regarding our mutual admiration for Harry Nilsson, because what I heard was a lot like a 21st century, southern-fried take on Aerial Ballet - a deeply personal record, both lyrically and musically, marinated in studio expertise, shot through with a wry sense of humor, that takes elements both ancient and ultra-modern and combines them into something that could only come from the artist in question and the experiences they have had."

liner notes by J. Moss

PENN BRYCE: folk, ambient, improvisation, spirit

bsky.app
studilaroche.com