“Quite unlike any other album you’ll hear this year.” That’s how we described Lady Hope, the 2017 album from Seattle-based songwriter Tucker Theodore released by Antiquated Future Records. “With its combination of droning noise and outsider folk, wrapped up with snaking tendrils of dense and snarling rock,” the record was “unapologetically complex and opaque,” practicing a singular style that nevertheless carried its own intuitive, subconscious power. Follow-up LSG pushed the boundaries even further and cast Theodore as something of a model figure. The artist on the fringe, working outside of, or even in triumphant opposition to, the contemporary Playlist Age.
New album Lewiston By The Sea, again released with Antiquated Future, only furthers these sentiments. The record originated from what is described as “skeleton recordings,” produced at the beginning the pandemic with nothing but a cheap synthesizer and a guitar, then evolved slowly over the year as long-distance collaborations fleshed out the tracks. Featuring guest vocals from the likes of Colleen Johnson (Flying Circles) and Jeff Shannon (If It Ain’t Breakfast Don’t Fix It), the result is experimental even by Theodore’s standards, cycling between a variety of narrators and personalities. The shapeshifting doesn’t end there, as the sound also refuses to settle in any one groove, constantly switching between genres and styles.
Single ‘Hollow’ is therefore not so much an introduction to the record, but merely a glimpse of one of its many faces. This track sees Tucker Theodore joined by Madeline Johnston (Midwife) on vocals, their joint chorus emerging stark and ominous from a twitchy lo-fi gloom.
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But as if to prove the variability of the album, the song’s portentous, Biblical weight is bookended by very different sounds. Predecessor ‘Spindle Heart’ combines post-punk, post-rock and shoegaze to form a soaring electronic number, while the expansive ambient track ‘Dreaming of Paris’ follows, a song built around Travis’s monologue from Paris, Texas that’s rich with the film’s sense of spacious melancholy. The only real common theme, beyond that nameless Tucker Theodore spirit, is an intermittent glitch, some electronic ripple that either grounds the artifice of the pandemic-era collaboration, or else centres the lonely futuristic potential humanity has now reached.
This question hints at a bigger one which hangs over the record. Is Lewiston By The Sea an organic album? Is it warm or cold? Take ‘Coming Home (I Can See the Fire)’, a seven minute stretch which dips to hell and back, somehow digital and primordial both. Or the removed flickering warmth of ‘Two Turns of the Handle’, the ancient latent dread of ‘After the Fire’ which sounds like the space either pre- or succeeding some great event. But even in the record’s most suffocating moments, those blackest, bleakest or electrical, there is a sense of humanity too. Perhaps hiding somewhere in the shadows, or merely conspicuous in its absence, a living spirit mapped by its own negative space.
Lewiston By The Sea is out now via Antiquated Future Recordings and you can get it from the Tucker Theodore Bandcamp page.
