This Is Lorelei's 'The Singer In My Band' Is a One-Man Back-Porch Miracle
Nate Amos — also of Water From Your Eyes — spent two years on the road behind Box For Buddy, Box For Star and Water From Your Eyes’ It’s A Beautiful Place, and wrote this one in transit. Matador’s own copy calls it his first true road record: the songs “incubated while daydreaming in the car without access to any instruments.” Amos cites bluegrass and Gordon Lightfoot as the inspirations he was chasing.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Amos produced himself, multi-tracked his own voice, and played almost every instrument on the record. The one significant exception is a beautiful one — his father, bluegrass musician Bob Amos, plays banjo on a song, and his sister Sarah sings backup on a few. The result should feel airless and doesn’t. Stereogum’s Tom Breihan puts it best: “Somehow, this guy managed to conjure the feeling of a sun-dappled back-porch jam session all by himself, a strange but impressive superpower.”
The Spatial Dynamics: The Auto-Tune and lo-fi synth beats of earlier This Is Lorelei work are gone. What’s left is stacked harmony as an architectural material. On “Watching Heaven Fall,” Breihan hears mandolins glowing while Amos’ harmonies “float into Jackson Browne territory.” On “Sailing (Your Baby’s Down),” Amos “hits the word ‘sailing’ with such gentle force, quietly jumping an octave and wrapping himself up in his own doo-wop harmonies like blankets.” “Hey Sarah Is It Gonna Rain Forever” pairs a tricky acoustic guitar-hero riff with purring drones underneath.
Standout Performance
Amos as his own harmony section. Every voice you hear answering him is also him, and the record never once tips its hand about it. Al Nardo, of fantasy of a broken heart, turns up for exactly one line near the end — the only outside vocal cameo, and it lands like a door opening.
Why It’s Certified
Start with “Billy Came Back,” whose insistent drums add urgency to what Breihan calls “its ecstatic acoustic sprawl, its sneaky psych-rock cowboy riffage.” Let “Nitro” — an instrumental barely a minute long — reset you. Then give the title track its due. Paste’s read is the plain truth of it: “The characters who populate Amos’ world may be down on their luck, but the music itself is as inviting as a small-town bar.” Certified great.