(2023) Danny Paul Grody - Arc of Day
Review:
Danny Paul Grody got his start in Tarentel and the Drift, both abstract post-rock bands out of San Francisco who leaned towards the quieter end of the guitar rock experiment. Just over a decade ago, he ventured out on his own in The Fountain, a gorgeous, mostly solo guitar album that found serenity in repeated picked patterns and subtle threads of melody. Since then, he’s made a half dozen albums under his own name, showcasing a self-taught facility with finger-picked styles and an expansive open-minded outlook that seeks the boundaries of blues, jazz, folk and drone. Arc of Day starts with Grody on his own, but slowly adds other textures—drums and bass from his mates in the Drift, Rich and Trevor Montgomery, an especially haunting clarinet from Jonathan Sielaff of Golden Retriever and, on one track, Chuck Johnson on pedal steel. He begins on acoustic 12-string in “Daybreak” a serene and introspective reverie in simple, octave-jumping figures, repeated like clockwork and surrounded with shivering clouds of overtone. “Light Blooms” brings in his collaborators, adding a faint touch of electric distortion and a whisper of shaken maracas to his mandala-like guitar motifs. Grody sets the piece in motion, executing the same rhythmic figure again and again, keeping it going (and also very still) through changes in mood and key. We hear the clarinet for the first time in this second cut. It cuts through with pensive clarity and, at one point, frays into a vibrato, the held note unfurling like a pennant in strong wind. One more player—the natural world—joins in “California Angelica.” We drift into the piece on a roar of surf, a little foghorn tucked into it. “Cathedral Tree” adds the unmistakable silvery sheen of Chuck Johnson’s axe to one of the disc’s most rock-like entries. “Slow Walk” electrifies Grody’s patient picking, adding a buzz and heft of dissonance to its limpid surfaces. The disc isn’t long, but it builds its own calm, centered world. It quiets the noise and pulls you in. Beautiful. — from dustedmagazine by Jennifer Kelly
Track List:
01 - Daybreak
02 - Light Blooms
03 - California Angelica
04 - Cathedral Tree
05 - Path to Olema
06 - Slow Walk
Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, ambient
Country: San Francisco, California
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)
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