Over the past few years, New York’s Dan Knishkowy has developed a distinctive brand of folk rock under the moniker of Adeline Hotel. Wistful, sometimes even melancholy, but most often relaxed, reflective songs with easy rhythms that conjure a tender, welcoming style. Following 2018’s away together, Knishkowy is back with Solid Love, a brand new full-length record on Whatever’s Clever that we’re delighted to share a day early. An album that does not break from this style, but shows a clear evolution all the same.
With an ever-changing cast of musicians and guests, Adeline Hotel has always blurred the line between solo and not, but Solid Love sees the project establish itself as a stable band. Alongside Knishkowy, Ben Seretan (guitar), Andrew Stocker (bass), Winston Cook-Wilson (of Office Culture, piano/keyboards) and Sean Mullins (of Wilder Maker, drums) make up this new settled quintet, what Knishkowy calls “five people with loud playing personalities, playing as quietly as possible.”
Not that the album’s cast list stops at five. Dave Lackner provides saxophone and flute, Kristen Drymala the cello, and the vocals of Brigid Mae Power, Matt Kivel and Devra Freelander all feature too. The result is a warm and leisurely sound, one that rejects statement or bombast in order to follow its own intuitive drift. In this manner, the songs of Solid Love are not solid at all, their hazy translucence never converging into any definite shape, but it is in this shifting that the title takes on a new meaning. “‘Solid’ is less definitive, more a changing of state,” explains Knishkowy. “On the verge of crystallizing, or beginning to melt away.”
Such ambiguity relies on a connection between its creators. Call it intuition, call it trust, call it the priceless product of a musical community built from the ground up between friends and collaborators. Because community is what Whatever’s Clever are developing, a spirit that’s apparent across each of their releases no matter how much their styles diverge. “That’s the whole thing,” Ben Seretan told us in a feature on his recent record, Youth Pastoral. “The whole act of playing music or really doing anything at all that other people might listen to—the person singing and the person listening, that’s a community right there, that’s a complex ecosystem. I want these things to grow, that’s the whole thing.”
Solid Love sees Adeline Hotel utilise this spirit and togetherness to create songs of organic flow, prone to change but only within the binding (if unspoken) logic of the unfolding rhythms. See the title track opener, its gossamer tones coalescing first into the tighter cord of guitar and then the shuffling percussive beat, eventually opening up into an almost jazzy improvisation. The intricacy is undeniable, the exuberance too, but rather than some onanistic example of experimentation, each development feels geared to that which precedes it—every instrument working to support and sustain the others.
Across all of this, Knishkowy’s mellow and often nostalgic vocals act as the anchor around which the other elements play. Rooting the track with a languid, plain-spoken energy. Because if Seretan harnesses community spirit to create songs of cathartic, ecstatic joy, then Adeline Hotel channels it into something more more subtle. A joy perhaps, but that of quiet longing and retrospection. The joy of remembering, of making plans. A kind of deferred joy that contains its own secondary immediacy, its own warmth and light. Perhaps love is a better word. For what is love if not the piecemeal spaces between the then and the now, the what will be?
Nowhere is this more apparent than on ‘Trying For You’, a track of fondness and loss where the narrator’s immediate emotions are nuanced and conflicted but their underlying drive is not. The song concerns meeting an old friend after an absence, though has come to take on new meaning with personal tragedy. And the fact that an existing track can function as a celebration and memorial of a dear friend hints at the heart within the Adeline Hotel project. Because there’s an inherent compassion shot right through the sound, one which facilitates this shift in focus not through vagueness but sincerity. When creating art is an act of collaboration and friendship, then the result is already a celebration, already a memorial.
This can be masked or lost, of course. Authorial intent can apply too much context, hammer home too specific a meaning. But the intuitive approach of Adeline Hotel sidesteps the trap. That the solid in Solid Love is not definite is its finest quality, and one which informs fundamental spirit of the record. For a solid love is not a rigid love. Rather it is a love capable of rolling and adapting, immune to changes in circumstance. A love born of community that comes to represent the community itself. A love that leaves no one behind.
Photos by Chris Bernabeo