Last year we reviewed Solid Love by Adeline Hotel, an album which saw the project morph from the pseudo-solo venture of lead Dan Knishkowy into a fully-fledged five-piece band. Described by Knishkowy as “five people with loud playing personalities, playing as quietly as possible,” the record was a warm and intricate ode to the subtle shifting at the heart of friendship and love. But things are a little different on Good Timing, the new Adeline Hotel album released this month on Ruination Record Co. Stepping away from the jazzy rhythms and retro singer-songwriter vibes of Solid Love, Good Timing is a collection of instrumental guitar compositions written and recorded by Knishkowy alone.
Feeling constrained by precision during the quarantined summer of 2020, Knishkowy spent his time making directionless sketches with his guitar, embracing the creative, free-associative process—that previously opened doors to more conventional songs—as an artform in its own right. The result was Good Timing, ten tracks which although less distilled feel somehow the purest Adeline Hotel has made to date, a direct expression of the instinctual foundation that has formed the basis of Knishkowy’s more traditional songwriter output. “I feel like all records are approximations of your creative process, in a way,” he says, “but with Good Timing, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to the source.”
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Knishkowy’s creative process was simple. Starting with a piece of improvised guitar, he would then play it back and improvise again, chaining these improvisations into an organic whole in which each link is informed and guided by those around it. As a consequence, the album’s rhythms and melodies are not confined to orthodox formulae, instead weaving their own patient patterns—at times hectic and others imbued with a natural zen-like calm.
Tracks like opener ‘Photographic Memory’ have the brittle delicacy of well-worn recollections, richly evocative in the subtle, elusive manner of slanted spring sunlight or a cool autumn breeze. The sense of the oblique is present throughout, not through some crafty sleight of hand but the sense that Knishkowy is using his guitar to feel his way around sensations just beyond the thinking part of his brain.
Take the title track with its slashed strums and pools of negative space, the wind-up clockwork acceleration at the centre of ‘Introspection #76’, or the stirring promise at the beginning of ‘Relate to Joy,’ moments of beauty and meaning which feel easy and somehow inadvertent. Moments which are accessible only in the absence of careful planning, allowed to grow free and wild without the strangling bonds of verse-chorus structures or lyrics.
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Good Timing is out now via Ruination Record Co. Get it from the Adeline Hotel Bandcamp page. You can also get limited lathe-cut 7″s in hand-sewn jackets or vellum sleeves.
