Peter Matthew Bauer - Mount Qaf (Divine Love) (2017)

American musician and songwriter Peter Matthew Bauer carved out a niche for himself primarily as a founding member of Top 30-charting indie rock group the Walkmen, but was active both before his tenure with that band and after its nebulous dissolution. Bauer was one of the founding members of the Recoys, an independent band from Boston that began in 1996. When the Recoys split up in 1999, both Bauer and bandmate Hamilton Leithauser went on to join fledgling act the Walkmen with some players from the also recently disbanded Jonathan Fire*Eater. Bauer played bass and organ in the Walkmen for 14 years before they went on hiatus in 2014, and he quickly set to work completing solo material under his own name. Bauer's soul-searching solo debut, Liberation!, was issued in 2014 on the Mexican Summer imprint. He followed it in 2017 with Mount Qaf (Divine Love), a collection of love songs released by Fortune Tellers/Kobalt. ~ Fred Thomas.