- Meditative, poignant and sometimes overwhelming ambient music made almost entirely with accordion.
- As Lonesome Leash, Walt McClements makes quirky pop music built around the accordion, his instrument of choice. On the first album under his real name, he takes the accordion and explodes its sound into cascading waves of sustain, taking one of the most distinctive sounding acoustic instruments and layering it into something that resembles a ghostly choir. The music is at turns meditative and bold, and instead of sticking to drone he weaves countermelodies into his slowly unfurling compositions, making them feel assertive rather than pensive. It's a short but powerful record of accordion vignettes, painting portraits of moods and places, with a special ear for processing and layering that hints at a whole new potential career arc for the American indie rocker.
At its best, A Hole In The Fence is an alchemical feat of sound, transforming the rise and fall of the accordion into a bright, metallic sheen: take "Beginning (still as ships)," which hurtles in slow-motion towards its climax where all the texture and grit of the accordion turns into a pulse of pure, blinding light. Or on the other hand, "Thresholds (through a hole in the fence)," where you can hear both soft and rough textures rubbing against each other in a densely layered soundscape. Over top McClements weaves bold, almost hummable melodies that contrast his otherwise droning structures.
It's this penchant for melody, which you can hear in Lonesome Leash and other projects, which makes A Hole In The Fence more than just a Pauline Oliveros worship record. The melodies on album highlight "Climb (two times past same point in six hours)," an abstract lament for public gay cruising spaces and the historic demonization of them, are truly bittersweet, as the song builds towards a melodramatic finish. He's still writing compositions with a beginning and end here, just with stories that feel buried underneath layers of accordion, sheets of sound.
McClements says that the LP is meant to "[convey] the beauty and wonder of secret worlds... a fragmented narrative connecting threads of the somewhat hidden worlds I've travelled through my life." If there is a narrative, he keeps it close to his chest, but the feelings are more important than the specifics. One of the album's best track is also one of its simplest: "Naked (a showing of scars)," where McClements starts out with a single accordion riff that feels natural as breathing in and out, before adding layers and layers of sound. If this is ambient music, then it's ambient music in active voice, pulling you along for the ride.
By the time that A Hole In The Fence reaches its end with "Rinse (repeat repeat)," it begins to feel familiar. Again, the track stands out stark with one accordion melody layered over and over again, until it sounds like a grand pipe organ, each individual stratum combining with the next to create a marvel of huge, inescapable sound, before simply falling away back into quiet, introspective mode. Despite McClements' waxing lyrical about the inspirations for the music, it's hard to read too much specifically into each track, but the feelings are undeniable, a mixture of nostalgia, joy, fatigue and regret that calls back to obvious antecedents like Stars Of The Lid as much as it adds to the legacy of this kind of sweeping ambient Americana. Each of these six songs feels like a rumination on something lost or forgotten, stories told in loops and sighs. They repeat over and over again until there's nothing left to say, until the accordion is barely a lingering breath, the kind of resolution that comes only with a real, raw outpouring of feeling.
Tracklist01. Beginning (still as ships)
02. Thresholds (through a hole in the fence)
03. Naked (a showing of scars)
04. Climb (two times past same point in six hours)
05. Reckon (holding burning beams)
06. Rinse (repeat repeat)