Quarterly are Christopher DiPietro and Kristen Drymala, Maryland natives who currently reside in Brooklyn. Their bio says that the duo make “instrumental music influenced by folk and classical traditions imbued with a vivid depth of field and quiet intensity.” On this, their debut full-length record, Quarterly serve up 10 tracks of beautiful and evocative music that marries Drymala’s cello with the guitar and lap steel of DiPietro. Quarterly charge head on at a perceived drawback of instrumental music, aiming not just to compensate for the lack of lyrics to create a narrative, but to revel in their absence. As they say about the album,
“Our debut, full-length LP was written with the notion that narrative, with its specificity of location and atmosphere, is an essential part of all music. As instrumentalists, we understand this to be a narrative without, or rather outside of, words.”
The result is something rather special. If you enjoyed the instrumental goodness we featured last year (e.g. Lejsovka & Freund, Danielle Fricke etc.) then you’re going to love this. ‘Trivial Pursuit’ opens with gentle guitar and the lazy buzz of cello, like a moseying bumble bee on a summer breeze. The song changes pace slightly around the halfway mark, the guitar rushing into quicker strums, little eddies and swirls in the musical current. It really is a lovely start.
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‘Old Black, New Black’ has swishy, shaken percussion and undulating licks of cello, topped off with some strummed acoustic guitar, while ‘Every One of Them, Dogs’ has minimal but spiked guitar and barely-there thudding percussion as the cello snakes around, tying itself in knots as it climbs and climbs. Additionally, pedal steel give things a sunbaked, almost mirage-like, western feel. ‘American Mastodon’ has a softly tumbling and cyclical guitar line and gliding cello which skates across the songs bare black background, as well as some harsher blares, sounds I like to imagine are the trump of the titular mastodon as it trudges through a frozen spruce woodland. The impressively-titled ‘When I Die, Bury Me in the Woods So My Husband Will Hunt For Me’ is slow and sad and elegant as a curl of woodsmoke from a lonely chimney.
The second half of the album sees something of a shift as things get a little more electric. ‘The Bell Suite I. Currer’ is a song for Charlotte Brontë, the first in a triptych of songs which the band describe as a “brooding meditation on authorship, which seeks to personify each of the Brontë sisters in stark romantic relief.” ‘II. Ellis’ is the song for Emily, while ‘III. Acton’ evokes Anne, ending in big distortion-smothered electric guitar. ‘Devils Tower’ continues the electric theme but has more of a clanging subdued quality, before closer ‘Ellis (Reprise)’ is slow and somnolent, with gently plodding and plinking percussion and the final elegiac cello line.
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Quarterly is a great record, more than just a change of pace to put on when you’re reading a book or concentrating on something else. It packs twice as much narrative content as most non-instrumental albums, it just takes a little more work on the listener’s part to find (and in some cases engineer) them. As the band say:
“These songs are lyrical vignettes that, seeded with associations, are meant to grow in each listener.”
You can buy Quarterly now from the Quarterly Bandcamp page.