Warm Midlife Grooves
Sons Of
Sam Prekop and John McEntire
Thrill Jockey, 2022
In 2010, when I was in my final semester of graduate school at the University of Minnesota, the painter Christine Baeumler and I had a conversation about aging, artistic success, and stagnation that I still think about. Specifically, we discussed how many successful artists, once they become successful (specifically financially successful), tend to produce work similar to the work that made them successful. I think John Currin may have come up, as did Kehinde Wiley.
Whom exactly we (snarkily) chatted about that spring afternoon doesn’t really matter. The point is that a sort of stagnation, or at least stagnation-in-the-service-of-satisfying-the-market, and one’s success-fueled lifestyle, can and does afflict successful artists of all stripes, particularly as they age into their success. Examples abound: in addition to Currin and Wiley, look at Pearl Jam’s post-90s output, or the arc of David Fincher’s career, or say, Picasso. In each case, the work starts out vibrant but over time the life goes out of its eyes.
Not so the new instrumental electronic record from Sam Prekop (best known as the lead of The Sea and Cake) and John McEntire (Tortoise), Sons Of.
Instead, Sons Of is a rejection of this version of artistic progression, both in how much Sons Of isn’t simply a calmer, agèd version of either Prekop or McEntire’s previous work, but is instead extremely alive and vibrant and new-sounding, insofar as it’s an engrossing, often head-bobbing, consistently interesting exploration of electronic instruments.
Given their history, I was excited when I first heard about Sons Of — Prekop and McEntire’s first release as a duo — but I wasn’t expecting it to be a 90s-esque, The Orb-reminiscent nightclub record full of simmering synths. But that’s what it is. This is surprising given that Prekop (57) and McEntire (52) are middle-aged, extremely experienced rock musicians; together, they’re credited in one way or another on almost 900 albums. Sons Of proves that neither are resting on their discographies.
Let’s start at the end of the album, with its fourth and final track, “Ascending by Night”, which has a distinctly sunglasses-at-night feel. Sons Of only comprises four tracks, but they’re all quite long; “Ascending by Night” — a song to drive fast to — is nearly fourteen minutes.
And what a 13:41 it is. The song’s beginning is ominous, with notes that sound like a far-off chorus, but by the 2:00 mark the drums have begun in earnest, and with them a sense of both speed and anticipation; the “Knight Rider” theme song and the opening music from “Airwolf” (to name just two 80s TV shows with vehicle-related synth music) are clear predecessors. But “Ascending by Night” improves upon its referents in a number of ways: first, simply by not being produced in service to any other form of media. Secondly and more importantly, “Ascending by Night” is a more interesting, richer exploration of the tonal possibilities offered by the (digital, largely non-tactile) instruments Prekop and McEntire chose to make Sons Of with — synthesizers. To be sure, “Ascending by Night” does sound like it was made by machines — one of the press images that accompanied the album’s release is of McEntire and Prekop sitting on what looks like an empty stage, surrounded by electronic gear which they’re dispassionately manipulating, while both men are dressed in heavy winter clothes — but the music isn’t cold. Instead, its many overlapping tones and interlocking rhythms feel positively warm; the production values aren’t so much incredible as they are enveloping. Perhaps the fact that, per Thrill Jockey, the album was largely improvised has something to do with the biological warmth running through Sons Of.
Sam Prekop and John McEntire by Mike Boyd. Thrill Jockey
Which isn’t something I expected from either Prekop or McEntire at this stage of their careers — an improvisatory, grooving electronic record — even though both have made and/or produced plenty of dance-adjacent music, as well as experimental-adjacent music. In particular, Prekop’s solo output hasn’t sounded like “traditional” indie pop/rock (the opening track of The Sea and Cake’s 2000’s record, Oui, “Afternoon Speaker,” is a good example of the indie rock canon) since 2005’s Who’s Your New Professor. Prekop first began releasing vocals-free electronic albums starting with 2010’s Old Punch Card and hasn’t looked back.
Prekop’s electronic work hasn’t exactly been easy — Old Punch Card is a difficult album that has more in common with Terry Riley’s “A Rainbow in Curved Air” and Suzanne Ciani’s minimalist electronic work than it does many “mainstream” electronic records also released in 2010 (Caribou’s Swim, Four Tet’s There Is Love in You). Which was doubly surprising, given that it was Sam Prekop of all people — the guy who rose to quasi-fame by singing vocally mushy, softly pleasing songs — who began releasing out-there, noodling-with-a-synthesizer electronic records. This still strikes me as a jarring shift, which has colored my experience of listening to Prekop’s work: I’ve had a hard time reconciling the fact that Prekop is now a vocals-free electronic musician with the music he released prior to that shift — music I remain more familiar with.
My subjective experience of his music aside, Sons Of can be seen as the next logical step in Prekop’s progression from chanteur to an amalgam of Morton Subotnick and Dick Hyman (of their Silver Apples of the Moon and Moog phases, respectively). But that doesn’t make Sons Of any less interesting. And that may be thanks to McEntire, whose drumming has been the backbone of every Tortoise* record since the post-rock genre-defining group’s 1994 debut; he’s also played with Prekop as a member of The Sea and Cake since the mid-90s. But the difference between the drumming in most Tortoise songs and those in Sons Of is that the latter were made with synths, versus a drum kit; McEntire’s drumming for Tortoise has always been jazzy (with much hi-hat work), whereas a degree of that is lost via the electronics in Sons Of.
But the forcefulness, the sense of being driven forward by McEntire’s interlocking rhythms, in Sons Of isn’t new to projects he’s been a part of; see “Salt the Skies,” from Tortoise’s 2004 album It’s All Around You. It’s quite different from anything on Sons Of, but shades of the increasingly frenzied building in “Salt the Skies” can certainly be found on Prekop and McEntire’s new album. The third track of Sons Of, “A Yellow Robe,” is at first exhausting and then mesmerizing in both its runtime (23:41) and energetic simplicity. To build on my point above re: biological warmth, the song would perfectly accompany sped-up footage of ants at work: it uses a limited palette of notes and shifts in key to great effect. And that limited palette leads to a degree of homogeneity to the music, much like a teeming colony of mostly-the-same things. Like ants.
But an image of busy ants doesn’t do “A Yellow Robe” justice. The song is a suite, and not simply because it’s almost twenty-four minutes long. It changes tone and color seamlessly a number of times during its length, constituting not so much movements as parts; while listening to the song, I also found myself thinking about Rube Goldberg machines and that famous Sesame Street video of crayons being made.
Put another way, “A Yellow Robe” is a minimalist composition that also happens to be somewhat appropriate for a nightclub, particularly toward the end of the night. And the song is successful in the way the most famous minimalist pieces (Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, Glass’s early work for cassette) draw you in and then hold your attention for as long as the composers decide to hold your attention; the best minimalist music manipulates its listeners. “A Yellow Robe” — and Sons Of overall — is also like its famous minimalist forebears insofar as once you’re in the music’s grip, once you’ve gotten lost in its interlocking rhythms and repetitions, the fact that the song has to come to a close, ever, comes as a terrible disappointment. The silence that arrives at the end of “A Yellow Robe,” indeed at the end of the album, feels like a loss. Which — whether or not the absence of a piece of music comes as a loss — seems as good a way to judge the quality of a piece of music as any. And Sons Of passes that test. It’s a record to keep on repeat, lest it ever stop.
Rube Goldberg, How to Open a Bottle of Beer Without an Opener, 1913. NRM.
