Polypores – Wildlife / Loner Deluxe – Living Room

We may one day face the grim prospect of more and more music being served up to us based purely our extant tastes and desires being fed back to us into algorithmically-assembled packages. Until that comes to pass, we must cherish and encourage those who can splice together their own combinations of sounds and ideas that can sate listeners’ appetites on subliminal and intuitive levels, whilst also pushing them to sample new additions on the artistic menu. Enter then, two distinctive albums which do just that, in varying degrees.

No stranger to these pages through prolific deliveries of electronic odysseys in his primary Polypores guise, modular sculptor Stephen Buckley challenges both himself and his loyal completionist followers with a second outing on the Texas-based Aural Canyon label in the shape of the revelatory Wildlife.

A deliberately synth-free selection, with its multi-talented creator switching and mixing between tenor recorder, acoustic and electric guitars, piano, drums, kalimba and assorted homemade percussion implements, this is an album generously overflowing with organically generated conceptions, full-bodied musicality and intrepid invention. Trying to pick out the highlights is close to impossible, because barely a crochet or quaver is underused across its dozen diverse instrumental pieces.

In places Buckley takes us through rippling guitar-led ethereality that bridges the gap between The Durutti Column and Spacemen 3 (“A Hole In The Air” and “Seeing Absolutely Everything, Then Never Seeing It Again”); utterly joyous electro-acoustic polyrhythmic workouts re-envisioning State River Widening’s Early Music with West African hi-life elevations (“You Are Here” and “Fascinate”); and unashamed nods to the woodwind infusions of Ludwig Göransson’s Mandalorian TV series scores (the title track).

Elsewhere, we are transported through mind-melding meditations of backwards guitars and plaintive keys (“Thought Bubble” and “Foxes”); trippy flashbacks to Eternal Tapestry’s Wild Strawberries (“The Faceless Clock At The End Of Time” and “The Sanctuary”); low rumbling psych rock (“Moonflower”); a loose jazz-flecked piano vs percussion duel (“Octopus”); and an exquisitely languid Another Green World-coded coda (“Swimming Out”).

Undeniably one of the very best things Stephen Buckley has put into the world to date, Wildlife is a wonderfully life-affirming and endlessly listenable adventure. Hopefully, this is the opening of a whole new avenue for his restless muse, rather than a fleeting detour.

Although contrastingly lower in ambition, the latest full-length offering from Loner Deluxe is nevertheless a subtly impressive rewiring of Rusted Rail label founder Keith Wallace’s own long-running DIY project. Revelling in its home-built balmy charm — specifically captured in the chamber that adorns its cover — Living Room is a collection that side-steps its more conventionally structured predecessors.

With Wallace dropping his vocals entirely this time around and regular collaborator Cecilia Danell (A Lilac Decline) intoning wordlessly throughout, this ten-track suite sits somewhere between being a soundtrack in search of a low-key independent film and a melodic songs-based set that simply didn’t feel the need for any lyrics.

While this unorthodoxy might have fallen flat in lesser hands, with inscrutable aptitude Wallace and Danell’s consistently reliable conjoining wins out yet again. Keeping it in the Rusted Rail family, celestially cooing opener “Out Into The Warm” feels like a baton-passing postscript from A Lilac Decline’s still-fresh Eternity Bores Me, released earlier this year, with aesthetics that seep into other parts of the collection.

Thereafter comes the kind of woozy keyboard and primitive drum machine fusions that Jason Lytle might have cooked up in a basement with the late Mark Linkous (“The Clock Is Ticking But The TIme Is Wrong”); drowsy Pure Phase-era Spiritualized meanderings on a budget (“West Coast Cooling” and “He Drank Holy Water”); imagined Folk Implosion outtakes with Madder Rose’s Mary Lorson as a guest singer (“Sixpack In The Snow” and “Summer Fires”); and sun-melted kosmische ambience (“Styrofoam Dolmen” and “A True Note on a Dead Slack String”).

Although a tad more variety in pacing and mood might have given Living Room greater reach, its sonic cocoon is nevertheless a comforting and absorbing place to spend forty or so minutes on rewarding repeat visits to the Rusted Rail catalogue.

-Adrian-