William Tyler 
This one’s taken a while to absorb. Unlike the bulk of Tyler’s back catalog, the breezes on Time Indefinite aren’t always so hung with honeysuckle. The record opens with an uncharacteristic scrape of noise, pulling up the floorboards of his foundations and settling the listener in to be unsettled. The record arcs out of “Cabin Six,” and into something a bit more bucolic on “Concern,” but even with his elegant fingerwork in play, there’s a faded photograph feeling to the song, something that erodes the beauty and enters into uncertainty. It’s a feeling that will linger in many of the pieces here. The album is imbued with the notion of memory; its permanence and impermanence, the coloration that occurs on the continuum of what we let ourselves remember and what the mind buries and distorts. Like The Caretaker before him, Tyler plays with corrosion and its subtle hunger. Sometimes the past comes flooding in golden waves, but many times it’s hung just out of sight, always in danger of the moths of memory working a few holes into its fabric.
It’s new territory for Tyler, at least in solo guise. Though a few years of working though soundtracks, psych sideprojects, and collabs with Kieran Hebden may have helped push the needle. The record walks the line between folklore and friction in a way that a few of his contemporaries have touched on as well. I’d be remiss not to mention the paint-stripping of Americana that Daniel Bachman has been working on of late, or the discomforted tapestries of Old Saw, but Tyler’s work feels like he’s hammered out his own corner of fractured folklore. A flickering and fading of the American legacy cranes its neck, apparent in “Hardest Land To Harvest,” and the wind-bitten “A Dream, A Flood,” but there’s something more opaque about Time Indefinite. There are eroded promises, sour-stomached moments of longing, discomfort, and disorientation. There are some whose memories are crisp and clear, Kodachrome reels of sorrow and joy, but for those with more complicated histories, it’s a process to peel away layers of pain covering up the lead and rot beneath. Tyler works through both halves of memory, the glow and the gloom, entangling the beauty and the brutality of exploring our pasts.
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