by Anna Solomon (@chateau.fiasco)
“Lasik,” the opening track on Wendy Eisenberg’s album Viewfinder, functions as the project’s thesis statement in an almost surprisingly direct way. In a drawn out barely melodic way, they sing through a narrative that they directly admit would be “the most heavy-handed metaphor” were it not true, getting the titular eye surgery. It’s a long, expensive, risky process to bring everything into focus, described over slow swells and chaotic drums. It isn’t just introducing the lyrical themes, at a relatively short six minutes, the song runs the gamut between more dramatic free passages, and sections that are more focused and melodic, without ever feeling any less uneasy.
Moving into the second track, “Two Times Water” starts with piano chords that sound delicate, both in how pretty they are but also in how they seem like they could crash and shatter at any moment. Eisenberg’s guitar enters to establish a seven-groove that rolls so evenly it barely registers as odd time. The descending phrase is familiar, almost reminiscent of Led Zeppelin’s “Misty Mountain Hop,” but reframed at a fundamental level. The whole trombone solo is a tense escalation, but when the arrangement readjusts for the piano solo, the bass spends a few measures walking down, releasing a bit of the anxious energy of the performance, if only briefly. Then the bass returns to plugging eighth notes and plowing the piece forward. The slowness of the solo guitar outro is a stark contrast in its emptiness, a texture that will return throughout. Later in the project, “Set a Course” spends its first minute and a half with only Eisenberg’s vocal and closes almost as quiet as it starts with a chilly piano and trumpet duet.
By contrast, the drums and guitar on “HM” plow forward like a hardcore band, but they’re supported by trombones and piano that take a for more ambient approach. The speed creates intensity, but it serves more to give the song a sense of motion blur. When the intro to “HM” is reprised around the seventeen minute mark of the album’s centerpiece “Afterimage,” every instrument feels slightly out of time, a reprised phrase but out of focus, not quite remembered in a coherent way. The dissonances of the piece are accented on repeat at a pace slightly behind that of the frantic drumming. The dizzying and disorienting performance only becomes more intense, violently thrashing against the musical meter with bursts of dissonant chords. Even in the Latin-inspired earlier phase of the improvisation, there’s a sense that the instruments are out of line with each other, especially the piano. Muted guitar lines poke out in odd ways, certain chords seem to hang a measure or two longer than they should, the tempo is never quite nailed down.
The title track is cut into two parts, and they each fall at these two extremes. The “intro” portion trades between held out trumpet tones, field sounds, and Eisenberg’s softest vocal on the project. The eeriness in the emptiness is compounded as the trumpet part increasingly resembles a screaming child. Then the back half of the piece kicks into gear with a guitar full of crunchy dissonance and a trudging groove in the drum and bass. Even as a relatively short song, there’s space for the arrangement to dissolve, build back out of the muck, then once again fall into an unnervingly quiet percussion outro that leads into the final song.
This closer, “In the Pines,” takes its name from an old folk song, performed widely from Lead Belly to Nirvana. It isn’t a cover of this tune, but it is still the cleanest and most harmonically conventional part of the project, arranged and structured like an old jazz standard. Eisenberg sings two verses, lets the trombonist take the lead for a verse, then returns for one final refrain. Each verse concludes with a seemingly contrasting statement, first Eisenberg is “chilled to the bone by a picture of him smiling,” then “charmed to my core by the depths of my anger.”
Viewfinder is an album built off these contrasts - the differences between what’s seen and what is, demonstrated through eclectic and often bewildering improvisations. Everything sounds slightly surreal. There’s so much virtuosity on display, but it’s all in service of creating a sound with a constantly shifting restlessness. Ultimately, it’s an enthralling and disquieting listen for its entire eighty minute runtime. It’s difficult to pin down in a genre labeling sense, and impossible to pin down in a more abstract musical sense.