Eli Winter

Each new release from Eli Winter over the last few years has been pushing towards the sound on A Trick of the Light. The talented guitarist was often discussed in guitar soli circles, garnering welcome comparisons with Daniel Bachman on his early records Unbecoming and The Time To Come. Collaboration would find him easily, though, and a full length spent sparring with Cameron Knowler would mark him as an excellent improviser and consummate foil. The tones on tape would shift with the next outing, his first for Three Lobed. An eponymous album in 2022 found a fuller bench beside him and a renewed focus that folded country and catharsis into his acoustic ramble. The album also saw a fuller reliance on the electric, gathering dark clouds over his once verdant valleys. Those clouds grow darker on A Trick of the Light, and the electric dominates here on all but one track.

With a rotating ensemble that includes David Grubbs, Mike Watt, Andrew Scott Young, and Sam Wagster among others, the new album finds Winter both among the players and as bandleader, turning turbulent from the outset with a scorching take on Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell’s “Arabian Nightengale.” Always a bold move to open an album with a nearly side-long dive into the abyss, Winter sets the tone for the album and makes the rest of the songs work to catch up in the wake the opener’s path. The song singes the listener, necessitating the salve from “For A Fallen Rocket,” the cut that keeps the most kinship with his last record. The rest of the album moves from post-rock tension to sunburnt country, letting Carla Bley’s “Ida Lupino” toast in the afternoon sun and finally finding a lightness on the closer. There have, as I mentioned, been hints that this is where Winter was headed, but even with an inkling, this lands as one of his boldest and most fully realized records yet. Scarred, sauntered, expressive, and elegiac, the album sees Winter push himself and his band to new and depths and exhilarating heights.

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