Sean McCann - Bitter Sea (2008 - 2011) (2026)

Recital boss Sean McCann assembles the best of his early material on 'Bitter Sea', plucking tracks from tapes, live recordings, CDrs and raiding his archive of unreleased goodies to provide a digestible 2CD overview of "roughly 40 developmental albums."
It can't be easy to follow an album like 'The Leopard'. McCann outdid himself with that one, spending a good half decade working on an experimental opera that genuinely deserves to be filed alongside Philip Glass's 'Einstein on the Beach'. So it makes sense that he's taken a breather here, looking back on the material he recorded when he was holed up in a tiny apartment in San Francisco. He'd been prolific, too, releasing countless EPs, collabs, splits and full lengths on labels like Ekhein, Catholic Tapes, Digitalis, Aguirre and Monorail Trespassing, among others. So to dip a toe in at this point is nigh on impossible, even flicking through Discogs is complicated.

'Bitter Sea' is a frictionless alternative, an anthology that McCann describes as a "seductive digest" of the period. And it's engaging, too - while there's nothing that comes close to the kind of batshit brilliance we get with 'The Leopard', we get to hear how those notions were formed. The earliest track on here, 'Midnight Orchard', the album's final 21-minute stretch of pitch-fucked drone, was recorded when McCann was just 19 in 2008. And the anthology cuts off at 2011, when he'd settled into a dreamier, more ferric sound - as we can hear on 'Everafter' and the moody 'It's Alright' from his eponymous tape. It's a lot to absorb, we won't lie, but McCann has done most of the hard work already; 'Bitter Sea' runs like a good playlist, giving McCann's output the contextual backdrop it needs.