“Only a month ago all of the habits of my old life died / Sounds so extreme, but it is not a lie / all is new / everything,” Wendy Eisenberg sing-speaks on ‘The Ultraworld’, a track that appears halfway through their latest album, a record full of dream-country-pop and intricate takes on 70s folk rock. The music arrives as a celebration of the artist’s newfound queerness and love. There’s a joyful feeling of reinvention throughout, integrating distant places and times into their life. The self-titled album features ten carefully crafted songs that are both fragile and confident, in dialogue with their younger self. It’s easily Eisenberg’s poppiest record so far.
The Brooklyn-based composer, improviser, and singer-songwriter has been building their reputation through different routes since the mid-2010s. Whether in jazz territories or improvisation, including the Bill Orcutt Quartet, or NNA Tapes-released noise punk Birthing Hips. There is a 2018 Zorn-initiated collaborative album for Tzadik, or, more recently, the improvisation trio Squanderers, shared with avant-rock veterans David Grubbs and Kramer. On the widely praised 2024 album Viewfinder, the experience of laser eye surgery inspired Eisenberg to engage in prog Americana ruminations on the subjectivity of the viewer.
While on Viewfinder, consisting of primarily instrumental song cycles, each piece pouring into the other in a free-floating manner, Wendy Eisenberg feels like a more focused exploration of what adventures one can take within a traditional song form. As Eisenberg confirmed in a recent interview with The Guardian, their “newfound comfort and happiness” need not result in comforting songs; they aim for complexity, as “self-acceptance is not a simple process”.
Eisenberg is accompanied here by percussionist Ryan Sawyer and bassist Trevor Dunn. Mainly, Mari Rubio (aka more eaze) plays pedal steel or violin and also co-produced the album. Their relationship, both artistic and romantic, is crucial for Wendy Eisenberg. For instance, ‘It’s Here’ is about them being in love and is guided by Rubio’s pedal steel romanticism. They share similar musical trajectories, with experiences in improvisation settings and traditional country. Both escaped their home states and thematised it on their records. They have a collaborative project together, whait, which sees them in the process of searching for a shared vocabulary. In return, Eisenberg left a mark on Rubio’s recent album, Sentence Structure In The Country.
Eisenberg’s new self-titled album is concerned with memory and meaning. The dreamy and time-shifting sound of pedal steel acts as a Proustian madeleine, as in ‘Another Lifetime Floats Away’, where Eisenberg shifts between half-lost memories, such as their mother making breakfast or motorway drives. In ‘Will You Dare’, a more traditional take on 70s country, Eisenberg sings: “And time is an earless thing, ignoring your cries / It shapes you, and scrapes you, and makes you ask / Why did I try? Did I try?”
You could write books, or at least essays, about songs like ‘Meaning Business’. It’s a strange song that deals with experiences of sexual assault and trauma in the style of a David Lynch script (the lyrics were written in the aftermath of the director’s death last year), with all the signifiers like backward speech, shifting timelines and dreamscapes. Eisenberg’s gentle guitar is joined by violin and Eisenberg softly repeats “et cetera, et cetera” into subtly grandiose baroque string arrangements that wouldn’t be out of place in a 1960s Walker Brothers song. At other times, the string arrangements can evoke the ecstasy of Talk Talk.
Wendy Eisenberg presents stylistically tight songwriting that still leaves space for unexpected turns and avant tendencies, while Eisenberg’s vocal performance keeps a certain infantile playfulness, in phrasing and tone. Maturity is, after all, as Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in one of the most beautiful pieces on (self)acceptance, “not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived”. Eisenberg manages to patch together not only personal memories but also their different musical routes into a stunning record that feels like an early contender for album of the year lists.
