If you’ve attended a performance in recent years by some of Brooklyn’s most innovative indie-music acts – Skeletons, Janka Nabay & the Bubu Gang, Chairlift, Glasser – then you likely have made the acquaintance of Jason McMahon already… he’s served as a live sideman for those acts and others. But Odd West, a new solo album that finds McMahon concentrating for the first time on acoustic guitar, is something new altogether. The album settles McMahon’s easygoing virtuosity into settings that draw on jazz, folk music, minimalism, Americana (weird and otherwise), and more besides. Quite literally, there’s a little something for everyone in this illuminating set.
Odd West is scheduled to arrive Jan. 31 on the Shinkoyo label, and several of the album’s tracks are available now for streaming on Bandcamp and other major platforms. But now – as McMahon prepares to take the stage this evening for a preview concert at Roulette in Brooklyn – National Sawdust Log is pleased and privileged to provide exclusive advance access to the album’s newest preview track, “Big Earth”—right here, right now.
Asked to describe his composition, McMahon offered the following thoughts via e-mail:
“Big Earth” can be hard to understand. The language is intentionally vague and undefined, intended to convey emotion without message. Still, in this strange tongue you will hear familiar things; the name of a loved one, a fragment of a half-remembered dream. The rhythmic subdivision of “Big Earth” is 7: an odd, esoteric meter, but also a biblical reference to Genesis and a musical reference to Heaven/Fulfillment (“Seven Steps to Heaven,” “All You Need Is Love”), which is then obscured, simplified, and vulgarized through the heavy hand of the arranger into the most basic meter of 2, which is itself a metaphor for humanity’s vain and counterproductive efforts to understand ourselves.
Odd West, due Jan. 31 on Shinkoyo, is available to pre-order now on Bandcamp. In anticipation of the album’s arrival, McMahon performs at Roulette tonight (Jan. 22) at 8pm; visit the Roulette website for details.
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