by Robbie Ludvigsen (@RobbieLudvigsen)
The immediacy of home recording is a double-edged sword. Creation and release of music becomes accessible and easier to all, but its pitfalls and obstacles have both artists and their listeners navigating between intimacy and a feeling of seeing something that’s not quite ready to be seen yet. It’s no panacea, but the counter to these obstacles (fidelity, polish, etc.) is imbuing songs with an inherent charm and closeness to the music that the format provides. It’s the difference between letting the roughness around the edges swallow the tunes and letting them guide the tunes.
With that in mind, when an artist finds a way to build a world around songs recorded at home, it’s so easily noticeable and can quickly turn recording at home from a hindrance to an advantage. Jason Albertini’s latest Helvetia album, Essential Aliens, is a masterclass on how lo-fi recording at home can be a vehicle to showcasing a vision of unavoidable, but captivating quirks and laconic storytelling.
That story is one of a recurring dream Albertini had wherein his life is upended by ghosts. Upon waking, he becomes a ghost himself in hopes of making it back to the “real world.” Essential Aliens is about doing all you can to keep from totally breaking down. The sounds on the album are an apt reflection of that fight, with instruments and vocals consistently bashing up against the barrier between cacophony and beauty. Often beauty wins, and the dissonance subsides.
With only one song over three minutes, Essential Aliens utilizes brevity and a deep bench of sounds and ideas to create a cohesive batch of homey and warm tunes. Blown out drums, scratchy guitars and wobbly vocals drift in and out of its fourteen tracks—and no one concept stays longer than necessary, never quite jumping headlong into a formless din.
The album opens in a fanfare of clipped drum spurts and filtered guitar scratches, building both tension and anticipation for a release that only comes when the next song begins. “Crooks Go in the Ground” is a 6/8 tumbler promoting a sentiment we can all get behind. It serves as a template for the rest of the album—a mixture of dried out drum grooves and earworm guitar riffs, twisting through Albertini’s lackadaisical vocal delivery. As the songs float by and Albertini deftly utilizes the fidelity as a boon, those bone-dry drum sounds and itchy guitar takes oscillate from head-tilting to endearing.
So by the time the album’s single, “Rocks on the Ramp,” comes around and its entrancing guitar riff and minimalistic groove takes off, you start to feel less like a bystander and more like a recipient. These songs could only be made this way, with this equipment, to be listened to exactly this way. From there on, Albertini cycles through a bevy of musical tricks. From a drop-out breakdown in “Why Am I Missing” to a voltage-starved fuzzy guitar solo in “The Echo Creek,” these songs manage to sound lived in and cohesive while not recycling any one idea. The closer, “Skit 8”--which is not a skit--wraps things up with a winding, major key guitar riff over straight ahead snare drums that abruptly shifts to a quarter-time fade out as Albertini’s softly spoken vocals carry us away.
Essential Aliens is not so much a collection of songs dictated by circumstance, but a statement on how to spin circumstance into opportunity and growth. When our ghosts leave us feeling unprepared or overwhelmed, or stuck and trapped, it is a chance to dig deeper into our surroundings and let them become canvases instead of barriers.