Variously playing the guitar, baritone guitar, bass guitar and pedal steel, taking those limpid and undulating strums and plucks and layering the parts while adding spectral or far-flung vocals plus the use of a talk box and foot-operated bass synthesizer, the first few songs on Toby Summerfield’s debut solo album Bodies of Water conjure echoes and traces of surf rock as though viewed through a math rock lens or summon up cactus winds.
Apparently drawing a degree of inspiration from Hawaiian slack-key guitar and leo ki’eki’e or ‘high voice’ singing, the other immediate frames of reference for Summerfield’s style on Bodies of Water are Robbie Basho and Bill Orcutt with a little bit of Bill Frisell. This combination of quick, glistening or sun-dappled strums and beatific yodels on the album opener ‘Post Pond’, which is eventually engorged by a synthetic distortion, or of somehow barren bass and baritone pitches plus more wolf-like howls on ‘Lake Anza’ is so engaging that one imagines the rest of the record will continue on happily in this manner.
But the guitarist – once part of the punky post-rock bands Larval, Crush Kill Destroy and Algernon, a member of the ‘post-everything’ quartet Ex Eye alongside the saxophonist Colin Stetson, drummer Greg Fox and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily on synthesizers while he has also collaborated with Dina Maccabee and Jaimie Branch, crediting his solo outing less to his influences than to the time spent on stage with these fellow musicians – proves more probing, more restless and more versatile.
Beyond the fingerpicking techniques and raga-like frames of primitive guitar or the noodling angularity of math rock, Summerfield engages in more driving passages and compositions like on ‘Caulk the Wagon and Float It’ where the rubber really meets the road. ‘North Branch of the Chicago River’ carries a lacquered Americana and ‘Dog River’ has a bit of upswing and bounce, like a jazz bass line while ‘Gallup Park Canoe Livery’ is a slender phantasm with spiritual overtones that might strike the listener as animist, indigenous or Buddhist.
Then the guitarist – who spent his formative years in Ann Arbor, moved to Chicago and spent time in Williamsburg, Virginia before settling in Lyme, New Hampshire where he lives today – brings it all back home with ‘The Pools Below Tannery Falls’ and ‘Grant Brook’ a bounding and cherubic or seraphic closer. Produced by Colin Stetson, offering up some easy listening yet transparently deep, Bodies of Water is a lovely and fond album that will also reflect back something of whatever the listener brings to it.
