The cut of the day section is still being fussy, but here’s another one for ya anyway.

With Neal Morgan’s new disc, To The Breathing World, one gets more than just the eight songs advertised. Each cut—opener “Birch Bark Boat in Space” included—is a few songs packed in one, like different movements in a piece of classical music. And upon diving into the disc, it gets a bit tough to keep track of just where you are. But it’s more like getting lost under blankets than it is getting lost in the desert. This is, after all, a record recorded with limitations that feel familiar. Morgan uses his kit and his voice and nothing else (my listing for his release show incorrectly stated that he used some loop pedals and effects, but I jumped to a false conclusion—the truth of the matter is that he just four-tracks this stuff, layering one segment on top of another. In performance he wails on the skins and sings.).

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“Birch Bark Boat in Space” impresses with melody first, as Morgan’s voice jumps out in punches over his crunchy, in-the-red drum freakouts. But it’s the structure and composition of the song that makes it so cool: The punchy intro melds into a airy chorus of oohs, then Morgan starts to pull the composition back into form with more traditional vocal lines that sound like from Whitman or Thoreau: “Out here in the day/ The sun and a comet sharing the sky/ In the red dusk/ On the riverbank/ In the land where I was born and raised.” “One day my brains will break down,” he continues, and the percussion breaks and fades with him. Suddenly his failing brain is a broken record. “I’ll be, I’ll be, I’ll be,” he stutters. “Fresh as a newborn.”

Because the percussive elements have to carry so much weight here, Morgan’s gotta be really smart about using them tactfully, and he’s pretty masterful at it. He paces the song, and the record, to tease our attention and underscore certain lyrical and vocal elements (the sentiment of which is often very abstract but very pretty) that he wants us to catch. I’m reminded of Olympia’s Kickball, one of the only other experimental pop bands I can think of that uses these musical hesitations. One’s far more likely to find tricks like Morgan’s in post-bop jazz. But Neal’s actual voice reminds me more of another area group in Scott Garred’s Super XX Man.

This is where Morgan is special. It takes more than the nerd-next-door who majored in music theory to make complex experimental pop music that can keep a listener’s intention. Great pop, no matter how limited its resources or complex its structures, has to have some real heart at its center. Or at least that’s what makes me dig it. Morgan has heart in spades.

Neal Morgan plays Artistery this Saturday, Oct. 24 with Why I Must Be Careful and ASSS. All ages.

Links:
Neal MorganSpace
Where “in spades” comes from (one cannot, technically, have ‘heart in spades’ in the game of bridge. But I’m green-lighting it for my corner of music criticism).

Photo courtesy of Mr. Morgan.

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