Nico Hedley - Painterly (2021)

The songs on Nico Hedley’s debut album Painterly were sparked by unsparing self-reflection. Sometimes they took the initial form of a sticky melody, a punchy one-liner, or an uncomfortable memory he couldn’t push aside. In an effort to push beyond writing “confessionally,” however, the Queens-based singer-songwriter and prolific bassist trusted in cryptic signals from the broader world—for instance, the miniature Emily Dickinson quotation at the center of the title track—to elevate his intimate sketches beyond himself.

The result of this intuitive process is an unusual and gorgeous collection of songs about loss, miscommunication, and selfishness. They push beyond their specific contexts without diffusing their emotional charge, which is as direct and plaintive as that of the country music Hedley was steeped in while writing the record. Sung in spindly melismas inspired by Hedley’s Nashville music North Star, George Jones, Painterly offers up a kind of cubist take on what he calls “achy breaky” country, taking additional cues from the baroque songcraft of Joanna Newsom and Jason Molina’s folk-rock exorcisms.

Painterly never delves into empty musical homage, though. Hedley’s “family band”’s approach always feels unprecedented, carefully underscoring his wistful, darkly humorous, and sometimes harrowing narration. (The unit features Hedley’s former Brooklyn roommates and trained jazz musicians: guitarist Ryan El-Solh, bassist Carmen Rothwell, and winds commandant Adam “Bones” Robinson, along with Jeff Widner on drums.) In the mode of the last couple of Talk Talk records, the songs follow non-linear trajectories, with soloists exploding out of the song for emphasis or receding somewhere behind it. Elsewhere, the whole band plays as loud as possible for a few bars at a time before vanishing completely. The upshot is a record that sounds at once like a very live ensemble recorded scrappily in a small room—the reality of the situation—and an abstract, three-dimensional studio collage.

Painterly often conjures tense exchanges on NYC street corners, but it begins with the narrator lost on a road in the middle of the South (“Tennessee”). Hedley’s wiry, fingerpicked accompaniment halts and accelerates like he’s changing his mind about what exit to take or how country he really wants this song to be. It ends (“Lioness”) with a swinging waltz tune, wreathed in steel guitar, following a moment of potential spiritual clarification: “But there’s a light and it’s shining not only for you/We could all feel the glow pouring out of the blue.” Like many of the finest moments on this record, the melody doesn’t quite sound triumphal and the climax doesn’t seem to last long enough. Gestures like these parallel the impermanence of easy conclusions in Hedley’s lyrics. In the world of Painterly, there is no respite from moving forward—often, away from others—in that constant attempt to re-access something within ourselves that always seems in danger of being lost. -Winston Cook-Wilson