Chuck Roth's Texture Songs Makes Metal Sing on Palilalia

Chuck Roth releases his second album under his own name, Texture Songs, on Bill Orcutt's Palilalia Records. That is the headline. The subhead: the New York guitarist and songwriter has made a record where the instrument's physical grit does the singing.

Roth's premise is blunt. An electric guitar is metal on metal — steel strings wound in more steel, 22 nickel-alloy frets (the thin bars across the neck that mark each note) grinding under the player's fingers. Beginners bleed on it. So, sometimes, do professionals. Forget the resonant wood, the review argues. The real action is friction.

What does 'texture' mean here?

The title's first word could suggest electronic effects that sand the guitar's edges down until it stops sounding like a guitar at all. Roth goes the other way. His texture is the bare metallic fact of the thing: the ridges, the pinprick points, the bumps. On record his guitar might suggest bells chiming, knives unsheathing or microwaves humming. It never stops sounding like a guitar. That's the discipline.

Who is Roth, and who are his neighbors?

Texture Songs follows watergh0st songs, Roth's Palilalia debut from last year. Both records work the same seam: singer-songwriter forms built from experimental free improvisation (improvised playing without predetermined structure), with Roth's airy, disarmingly emotive voice placed on equal terms with the dissonant machinery of his playing.

The label matters to the story. Palilalia Records, run by guitarist Bill Orcutt, has more or less singlehandedly sparked a renaissance of solo guitar music that is adventurous but accessible — punk and conservatory avant-gardisms merged, nostalgia for the instrument's past glories resisted.

The most useful comparison, to a point, is Wendy Eisenberg, a Palilalia regular and member of Orcutt's Guitar Quartet. Eisenberg's songs move from one thought to the next with rigorous lucidity. Roth's are impressionistic and blurrily evocative — more Mark Hollis (the late Talk Talk singer whose solo work dissolved pop into whispers) than Robert Wyatt. Sometimes the records suggest Midwest emo, borrowing its vocabulary of twinkly suspended-chord arpeggios (chords that delay resolution, hanging in the air) to convey longing as big as the night sky.

That's the span: bloodied fingertips at one end, sky-sized longing at the other.

What's the verdict?

Roth keeps the instrument's body audible while making it sound like almost anything else. The metal never disappears. Few guitarists manage both at once, and fewer still write songs you'd hum. If Palilalia has built a house for this music, Roth is quickly furnishing it.