Bill Brovold | Ghost Music
(Team Love Records)
I've been digging back into Lester Bangs of late, and his crusty writing has been making me want to pull an even crustier Nick Tosches move and not listen to this record before reviewing it. If anyone could go along with that, I have a feeling it's veteran experimentalist and self-proclaimed (at least by a 2018 album title) Superstar Bill Brovold. But I didn't start my own rock-crit career until after Bangs had died, so I just don't have that temerity, much less fearlessness, in me. That's good, because Brovold's latest adventurous instrumental disc is full of the "horrid blare"—albeit of a pastoral bomb-scape nature—that Lester loved.
Call it Metal Machine Music for cows. Brovold—mostly on steel guitar himself and joined here on long, pandemic-weary tracks like "Tardigrade Party," "Troll!," and "My Last Conversations with Eric" by Johnny Evans, Adriana Camacho Torres, Mary Alice, and Mark Ormerod—is a multi-faceted musical and visual artist who first found his niche in Bangs-era New York no wave circles. He also made big, yet sometimes contrarily quiet, noise in Detroit with Larval. These days, he has a studio in the Hudson Valley. He assays, with his small, gossamer ensemble on Ghost Music, a Harry Partch/Terry Riley version of droning, yet entrancing, ambient Americana every bit as haunting as the title might suggest, especially on the epic, album-length closer "I Can Still Hear Nico." It makes, like Shirley Jackson, for shimmering, but quite sleepless nights.
