ASHER WHITE - Home Constellation Study LP

Highly recommended.

"White’s prodigious early years may help to explain the accomplishment and imagination of Home Constellation Study, an album whose abundance of ideas might seem excessive if it weren’t so carefully arranged. One song sounds like Radiohead with periodic interruptions from Lightning Bolt, another like Burt Bacharach by way of Jim O’Rourke, a third like a Gamble & Huff symphonic soul epic downsized to the scale of a basement rehearsal room. A partial list of instruments that White played includes guitar, bass, drums, banjo, glockenspiel, granular synthesis, piano, and “fake mellotron”—nearly everything on the album, save for some horns and additional electronics.

White clearly loves pop and outré music from many eras. The period that Home Constellation Study most directly recalls is the one just before she started uploading her work: the mid-to-late 2000s, a time when indie rock held accessibility and experimentation in delicate balance, when a bruising noise-rock band might share a bill with a psych-folk collective that seemed sort of like a cult, when DIY scenes had just enough attention to feed bands’ ambition—but not yet so much that they crumbled under the pressure or cleaned up their acts and signed to majors. And though White wrote and recorded Home Constellation Study primarily by herself, it feels distinctly social, in an embodied, in-person, perhaps old-fashioned sort of way. So much music from young songwriters and producers now evokes the solitary overstimulation and context collapse of hours spent online. White’s feels more like hitting the road with a friend, making impromptu stops, laughing together, getting into arguments whose stakes are not hidden behind screens, then talking it out and hitting the road again." - Pitchfork (8.0)