Locust Land

Album review

Multi-dimensional Chicago guitarist Bill McKay, a one-time member of bands Sounds of Now, Broken Things and Darts & Arrows, released his solo debut Esker in 2017. McKay then spent the past half decade as an astute collaborator with such angular players as Steve Gunn, Bill Callahan, and Will Oldham. On Locust Land, his solo follow-up, he continues to explore rock, jazz, and folk in his idiosyncratic way. Using evocative terms like "liquidity," and "garage jazz," to describe his music, McKay accompanies his guitar work on organ and various synths and stacking overdubs in compelling multi-hued settings. Opener "Phantasmic Fairy" has the feel of a renaissance guitar piece played against a psychedelic synth background. The straightforward folk pop number, "Keeping in Time," has unmistakable echoes—in a very good way—of Cat Stevens in his prime. With McKay going raga on electric guitar, the instrumental "Glow Drift," with Michael Patrick Avery rattling cymbals and bell percussion in the background, feels like a close relative to "Sympathy for the Devil." In another all-instrumental track, "Radiator," with Sam Wagster on bass, McKay intertwines overdubbed lines with the flavor of English folk rock before ending with an emphatic strummed chord. After a ringing intro, "Oh Pearl" features McKay on bluesy slide guitar and the smaller higher pitched requinto guitar, on an all-instrumental journey whose rhythms are influenced by the North African desert blues. A tentative but effective singer, McKay's lyrics are routinely cryptic and skeletal. In "Half of You" he delivers this album's best lines: "What a thing to write about/ Your family's so far out/ They think it's hard on you/ Well, at least they know some/ But not the half of you."  And perhaps alluding  to his restless creativity, McKay sings on "When I Was Here,"  "After all this time I'm not sure what has changed/ Though things in my head have all been rearranged" before the realization that, "We can play and seize the day/ The sketches draw you to their game." A masterful player whose self-portrait is filling in, Bill McKay continues to build a unique musical dialect. © Robert Baird/Qobuz