Always a restless guitar spirit, Julian Lage explores new territory with this album not only with his core team of bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Dave King, but ups the ante by bringing in the textured guitar voicings of Bill Frisell to create creative atmospheres and moods.
You can feel Frisell’s presence right from the start, with slow, deliberate and plodding pulses that create a Cumberland Gap casualness to pieces like “Tributary” and the Chet Atkinsy “Auditorium”. Lage’s economic style is still able to swing as on “Word For Word” and the fun “Fairbanks”, but all of the songs (between 3-6 minutes) have a concise focus on melody and lyricism, as on the easy blues of “Castle Park”. Lage shows he can still bear down, riding over King’s drums on the country rocker “Chavez” and digging in on “Heart Is A Drum”, but Frisell’s textures always keep the mood feeling like a late night at the Moose Lodge, comfy, casual and unpretentious.