by Sara Mae (@scary_mae)
There is a new softness in Rob Grote’s music as Super Infinity, with his seven song release Palace, out via CS Press. The songs hover between playfulness and childlike awe: jangling reverb (“Desert Oracle”), words that tumble and river over themselves (“Avoiding the Dull Lights”), and layered head voice (most songs on the record.) Grote said he wrote these songs “as a reprieve from recordings that were taking much more labor.” He mentions some first takes were involved, and this approach reveals itself in the ease of the lyricism, the closeness of the subject matter.
In “Flashlight,” Grote sings, there’s a “flashlight shining on an open wound… caught me thinking of you.” The riff in the song picks up and sinks into Grote’s foundation of catchy folk rock riffs, chunky acoustic strumming. The album stays grounded in its production. Live, these songs are sometimes accompanied by saxophone and multiple guitars, but the tone of this record is windy, falsetto. Rob Grote’s approach to singing is normally vibrato, radiant, but in the title song, “Palace,” he stays quieter, repeating in whispers, “I’m in your palace, palace, palace.” This album then is a reach towards another person, of allowing yourself to be brought along to someone else’s sacred space. Which is also true of “Sadie” as Grote sings, “Lay down with me dear, I’ll keep keep away your demons.” What kind of intimacy happens when you share worlds with another person? The production evokes an Elliot Smith shininess, wetness. “Palace” and “Sadie” both do. In “Sadie,” Grote sings, “Sadie looks so wounded, you should see the other guy, You know he looks just like me but with tears in his eyes.”
In 2019, Rob Grote left off with an album under the project name Goat Mumbles, the album itself called Super Infinity. The album was synthy, much closer to Porches in its airy weirdness, song titles like, “Sunshine Laundromat” and “The Messiest Jar of Honey.” There is something inherently more solemn to this solo follow-up, though Grote has released two albums with The Districts since then. “Avoiding the Dull Lights” sounds closest to The Districts, thinking especially of “Do It Over” on their most recent album Great American Painting. Rather than sprawling rock, he hits succinct lines like, “you see clearly all alone”. Sadie could compare to “6 AM” on A Flourish & A Spoil, except there’s less grit now. This EP seems to be more interested in intimacy.
Rob Grote has talked before about being inspired by the fire of pastors of hometown Lititz, PA. There is a spiritual bent to his lyrics in lines like “We lost the light we lost the light … We are one we are one tonight.” He takes on unsettling vocals and chord shapes on “Foxhole Automatic Choir.” It’s almost a little uncanny until the song locks into a momentum — “tastes just like heaven when she’s teaching you sins.” With this comes a sort of literary lyricism — the sad clown who looks so sleazy, an observation of everyday life, echoes of Americana that punctuate his more intimate gatherings, a little Whitman, a little O’Hara. In “Someday in the Sky “ — the last line reveals itself to be a grief song, “No time to say goodbye, no time to say goodbye.” It imagines a place beyond this everydayness. Palace in its entirety is a reflection on the alchemy that comes in pivotal moments in our relationships, the way those relationships can magnify our connections to the larger world around us.