There’s always a strange combination of continuity and change within a new album from Adeline Hotel. Each record building upon what came before it while often in some respects also turning away to chart new ground. As though the project exists as a kind of world of its own, and the function of each release is to bring us a view of a different corner. Adeline Hotel as a vast space we’re discovering album by album, song by song, with Dan Knishkowy not so much engineering the experience as leading the way.
This exploratory spirit is central to Whodunnit, the brand new full-length from Adeline Hotel set for release via Ruination Record Co. next month. It’s an album following a tradition which lists the likes of Gillian Welch, Neil Young and Van Morrison among its practitioners. Songs as a form of stream of consciousness, not only in terms of lyrics but the very sound itself. The sense of having tapped into some wellspring of movement or momentum and choosing to lean into the flow.
The title track was the gateway into this style. “With his acoustic guitar dropped to a deep, open tuning,” Sam Sodomsky describes in the liner notes, “the Brooklyn artist noticed a fragile melody resonating from the strings, stretching out like a neverending highway.” From there came lyrics, emerging as profound meditations that unfurl in a trance-like flow and introducing the central theme of the record. That of transition, existing in the strange space between loss and whatever comes next, searching for clues as to exactly what happened, not to mention where the future might lead. But while the title evokes classic detective fiction, the possibility of cracking the case remains distant. Because what if there was no guilty party or innocent wronged? What if nothing happened but life itself?
