Color Studies

Releases from Bombadil and Durham’s Andy Stack are testaments to the chemistry

BY JORDAN LAWRENCE music@indyweek.com

later in the process.

When it comes to the music, this process works beautifully, reshuffling Bombadil’s mix of acoustic and electric elements and peppering in some surprising pet sounds to create exciting, resonant arrangements.

Lyrically, In Color can sometimes feel more distant than other Bombadil efforts, the concept and recording method restricting the group’s typically intense emotional honesty. But the songs in which everything lines up are among the band’s best.

Ramseur | Friday, June 2

When thinking about Bombadil, it’s hard not to get wrapped up in the Durham band’s heartening resilience.

The affably off-kilter pop band persisted through member Daniel Michalak’s temporarily debilitating nerve condition, around the close of the ‘00s, and the departure of founding members Bryan Rahija and Stuart Robinson, several years later.

Throughout all this the band has hung on, putting out some of its most bracing and beautiful work with only Michalak and James Phillips remaining from the band’s original core.

On In Color, the duo finds a fresh spark of creativity in overcoming its latest hurdles: an ocean and a pandemic. In 2019, Michalak moved to France. To keep their internet-based recording fun, the band made two rules for themselves:

1. They would alternate writing songs that emotionally responded to the different colors of a color wheel.

2. On each song, one of them would compose chords and instrumentation while the other would handle melody and lyrics; if you wrote a part, you couldn’t play or sing it, and instead had to pass it along to another collaborator, like guests Nick Vandenberg and Skylar Gudasz and new band member MK Rodenbough, who contributed vocals

Opener “Brown Pennies” slowly builds up a scuffling symphony of electronic beats, keyboard samples, and acoustic strums as Michalak struggles to focus on how the word can feel “so good and fine” when gravity (and inflation) make it seem pointless to break open your piggy bank. Phillips stares down “Yellow Clouds” of sneeze-inducing pollen, pondering mortality as he longs for lazy summer days to “swim in the dirty river / Drink beer every day,” wandering through amiable strums, rich harmonies and a laidback haze of various synth textures.

Flutters of guitar and a shifting backdrop of whirring electronics back Rodenbough, who brings lilting serenity to “Indigo Seamstress,” chasing the ineffable feeling conjured by a color that “does not exist.”

Other songs connect less powerfully.

The stomping electro-pop of “Orange Planets” is a blast, landing like Animal Collective doing Genesis, but the central metaphor comparing “a galaxy of pretty people” to “a bowl of oranges spilling on the carpet” is blunt, and other songs bear some forgettable lines. “Purple Architecture” reaches a clever conclusion—observing two could-be lovers who pass on the avenue and “share a commonality in ignoring architecture”—but the “Day in the Life”-ish verses swerve too close to the banality they describe.

In the end, though, In Color succeeds as another expression of a band determined to persist and find compelling new ways to reinvent themselves. For those of us listening along, this remains affirming.

Sleepy Cat | Friday, June 9

True to its title, Inter Personal is the kind of album that could only be made by two people who know each other exceedingly well.

Even if you didn’t know Durham’s Andy Stack (Wye Oak, Joyero) and Asheville’s Jay Hammond (Trippers & Askers) are longtime friends and one-time college roommates, or that they decamped to a remote cabin to record the album while also spending “a lot of time locked in thorny conversations about love, marriage, getting older, various tensions in our lives and within ourselves,” as Stack described to Stereogum , you’d feel their profound connection listening to the album.

The seven anxiously ambient instrumentals lean on guitar, drums, and synths, and are all improvised, though they don’t immediately scan that way. The album is patient but not static, and as one part mutates and refracts, the response is so immediate as to feel nearly composed.

Take the opening “Anxious in Love,” in which glitchy synths, skittering drums, and angular guitar swirl and circle each other, twisting themselves into giddy knots. The patterns shift restlessly, evok- ing the exhausting ecstasy of infatuation, but the instruments are never less than utterly in sync.

The album often feels like it’s making subtle twists on the work of other engaging instrumental rock acts. The beaming loops of “Anxious in Love” come across like a more jazz-y Collections of Colonies of Bees.

The serene, synth-pierced electric guitar vistas of the title track envision a more electro-inclined William Tyler. The rippling intensity and slow, echoing riffs of “Life on a Ship” wouldn’t be out of place on the Earth essential The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull

Inter Personal is most resonant when the comparisons are less obvious.

The closing “The Quietest Singing in the World,” for instance, grabs poignancy by placing eagerly splashing drums and cymbals in contrast with forlorn drums and wandering guitar lines that seek calm contentment. The thoroughly distinct result is at once relaxed and on edge, a relatable state of conflicted mind.

While not every tune is so deeply felt, the appeal of Stack and Hammond’s sounds and their captivating chemistry remains impossible to deny. W