JUST FRIENDS by BEN MACDONALD

“Just Friends” makes music about as coy as its moniker portends: the music of tension. We do not mean that the music is “tense,” or even “intense,” although at times it may be each of those things. At times, in fact, the music is positively soothing. Rather, we mean that we submit to the tensions of getting lost, and getting found—together. Merely listening, it turns out, defeats our heroism and rewards our trust. A work of self-sabotage and, equally, a work of high—the highest—fidelity, this is a record with which one can get obsessed.

The distribution and redistribution of stress. The expansion and contraction of space. The confusion of figure and ground. Various disasters of scale. The possibility, always retrospective, of a plot. On the opener, “always as always,” lost, but unalarmed, we find our way home, only home turns out to be rumbling, and within earshot of the electric blues. Then we discover a composed, walking melody, a coda. No clarinet. Meanwhile, searching clarinet, on the next track, gives way to nearly topographical relief: “an other thing, an other world.” Major bass. Finally, some rain. Who knew one could be so thirsty?

One can only give examples of miracles.

“Middle weather,” the third cut, is uncut phenomenology—pitch, cadence, timbre. The bass pops, embracing drum intervals and rhythms; the clarinet forms the eponymous “weather,” a utensil scraped across the sky. Some feedback, for management. Eventually, the argument, executed by the whole ensemble, apes—seems to—the patient shape of the drums.

Catastrophic dread delivers a bass-man with a bow: sing a song of dread. “Further on” emerge our ginger band of charmers, warbling. This is what one does with dread. One charms it.

Busted as hell, but a beat, some snaking lines, and some fusion sounds. Then a breakdown. Then what survives: “Untitled” vastness of eventually hurtling sublimity.

We close on a torch song. The theme is stated. The guitar solos. The theme is restated. In slow motion, the effects of gravity are more pronounced. Lusciously recorded at Electrical Audio, engineered and mixed by Brian Sulpizio, mastered by Taylor Deupree, each sound sounds to have been struck between the sheets—your sheets. “Take heart.”

- Adam Weg