Options is the solo project of Chicago’s Seth Engel, who is well known in Chicago’s musical community. Outside of Options, Engel is a sound engineer and musician, and has recorded releases for the likes of Ratboys, Pinegrove and Nnamdi Ogbonnaya. He also contributes his musical talents to Coaster, Great Deceivers, Pyramid Scheme, and Lifted Bells, and is Nnamdi Ogbonnaya’s primary touring drummer.
With so much collaboration on the go, Options offers Engel the chance to do everything for himself. The project lets him write, record and mix albums that take the influences of his other work, melt them down, and, with a rigourous attention to detail, create something entirely his own. His latest effort, Vivid Trace, promises to be both the “darkest and most melodic” Options record yet, what the blurb describes as “a candid quiltwork of pop-rock intricacy that exhibits Engel as both a product of his prolific environment and a powerfully unique songwriting talent.”
Vivid Trace is an album of succinct songs, though this conciseness belies the complexity and ambition of the release. The songs, many of which clock in at two minutes or less, push out in all directions, the style shifting between tracks and the tempo within them to chart the whole gamut of indie rock influences. Take for example opener ‘Waiting’, which is something of a rollercoaster, the pace rising from hip langour into impassioned crescendos. These peaks and troughs mark the release, such as the passage from rockers ‘Hold Out’ into ‘Knocked’ into the restrained ‘Wash’, though the latter itself rises into gradually into an unsettling rhythm and style.
Indeed, the rollercoaster analogy fits Options neatly. The changes in tone and pace are not just surprising and welcome but feel engineered as part of a wider experience, Engel able to maintain a supple, agile nature to his sound that allows a sense of fluid motion. Even the more arrhythmic and angular moments feel part of this overriding logic, breaks in the flow that only highlight the ultimate progression of the record. Think of those Rube Goldberg marble runs, contraptions of perpetual motion where the whole system appears to grind off course before a tiny detail unlocks the obstruction and shoots the ball on its way once more.
Which is how single ‘Fog’ can tramp forward with lo-fi cool, ‘True’ ignite in explosive energy and ‘Wandering’ dial down to an unadorned ballad all within the space of five minutes, and how ‘Go Without’ and ‘And On’ can emerge with fluctuations of their own, and yet Vivid Trace remains the opposite of jarring. Options have crafted a ride of tiny details and epic proportions, a mosaic of moods and emotions that only grows more impressive on closer examination.
Today we have the pleasure of hosting a stream of the album a few days ahead of release.
09/11 – St Louis, MO @ CBGB ^
09/12 – Lawrence, KS @ Replay Lounge ^
09/13 – Rock Island, IL @ Rozz Tox ^
09/14 – Chicago, IL @ The Hideout ^
10/01 – Detroit, MI @ Deluxx Fluxx *
10/02 – Toronto, ON @ Baby G *
10/03 – Montreal, QC @ Bar Le Ritz PDB *
10/04 – Burlington, VT @ ArtsRiot *
10/05 – Portsmouth, NH @ Book and Bar *
10/06 – Boston, MA @ Lilypad *
10/07 – New York, NY @ Baby’s All Right *
10/09 – Philadelphia, PA @ PhilaMOCA *
10/10 – Washington, DC @ Songbyrd *
10/11 – Norfolk, VA @ TOAST *
10/12 – Raleigh, NC @ Kings *
* SOOPER Tour w/ Nnamdi Ogbonnaya
^ w/ Fond Han
Cover photo by Vanessa Valadez, album art by Mary Clemens