by Atilla Peter (@attila_peter23)
“Holy visions in the opposite view of my mirror,” Dan Knishkowy sing-whispers on “Dreaming,” the aptly-titled opener of Watch the Sunflowers, the Brooklyn artist’s latest release under the Adeline Hotel name. It won’t be the last time he talks about such moments of revelation. And it’s not the first either.
“Holy visions disappear from here,” he sang on the Nick Drake-like ballad “Ordinary Things,” taken from 2020’s Solid Love, a languid folk rock album. A year later, the line that opened the piano-led The Cherries Are Speaking read “Holy visions of white orchids slow the rhythm of my dreams”. Four years on, those holy visions continue to emerge, revealing themselves throughout Watch the Sunflowers, accompanied by a question each time. “Am I dreaming? Am I living? Where will I begin?” Though they may linger, the visions offer no answers.
“What I’m going through is hard to describe,” Knishkowy admits halfway through the mesmeric album closer and title track, but he doesn’t seem to mind. And neither will you if you can claim, the way he does on the 70s folk-inflected “Swimming,” that all your worries are visions. Why would you need certainty when the only concerns you have are ideas and images in your head? What you can rely on, though, is Knishkowy’s ability to address complicated feelings, either by zooming in, bringing a magnifying glass to the complexities of human relationships, or by panning out and moving so far back that the surroundings don’t just appear smaller but seem altogether different.
The follow-up to 2024’s Whodunnit, which portrayed the end of a marriage and the isolation it caused, Watch the Sunflowers was almost a decade in the making. Knishkowy has even likened his approach to filmmaker Richard Linklater’s, whose Before trilogy spans 18 years. Rather than letting the songs burst forth—a choice that made Whodunnit so compelling—this time he made sure the songwriting process allowed him to inhabit them and notice how the passing of time changed both what he had to say and the arrangements he chose to say it. Although he took a different approach, he achieved the same result: the new record is spellbinding and impossible to label.
Indie folk, alt-country, dream pop – the songs borrow from these genres, but don’t fall into any one of them. Indeed, they only tolerate aesthetic adjectives such as ‘kaleidoscopic.’ This is a quality they all share: consisting of different elements and patterns that shift continually. “Nothing” is soothing, hypnotic, with the notes played by the acoustic guitar cascading as Nate Mendelsohn’s gentle saxophone lulls you to sleep, but then a harsh, fuzzed-out guitar shakes you awake and proceeds to play a spaced-out solo before it trails off, sensing that the song has decided to become quiet again so you can drift back to sleep. Elsewhere, despite its slightly ominous-sounding intro, “Ego” may be the album’s softest track, and one of many where fellow Ruination Records artist Jackie West’s turn on backing vocals leaves you dazed with beauty. But then, if only for a few moments, the instruments seem to engage in a fight as if struggling for supremacy, creating a mess that is equally unexpected and welcome, with the piano prevailing before the guitars take over and, though frail and fading, guide you to stillness.
If this all sounds a touch too poetic, it’s because Watch the Sunflowers is a poetic album. Or perhaps ‘imagistic’ is a more fitting description; Knishkowy prefers precise, strong visual images to storytelling. He tends to give you only the contours of memories without defining a time or a place, and even when he does provide some detail, as in the title track (“Went to Italy, 4th of July”), he appears to be more invested in finding new memories, or rather, visions. “Watch the sun collect visions in the mirror that I could not forget,” he muses, and it seems as though he’s willing to settle for ones that are not holy, just as long as they prove to be both enduring and vivid.
And all the while, you’re floating above a field of sunflowers, eyes closed because they're too dazzling to look at, enchanted by the strings that turn the already gorgeous song transcendent. It’s a shame that albums as beautiful as Watch the Sunflowers have to end. Thankfully, it creates a precious memory of your own that won’t fade anytime soon.