Mustard Gas and Roses

MGR
Wavering On The Cresting Heft

Fast on the heels—or at least nipping at them, or something—of 2006’s Nova Lux and this year’s Impromptu collaboration with Sir David Scott Stone, guitarist M. Gallagher has returned with his second instrumental solo album, Wavering On The Cresting Heft.

This time out, Gallagher incorporated more structure, more distortion, more dark foreboding into his almost-all-guitar aesthetic. “This release is a bit different than the last full-length I did,” he offers. “The music is more concise and to the point and the songs are more like songs rather than long ambient passages.”

The album occupies the nebulous purview between active and passive listening, in which phrases and sounds shift in and out of focus, vanishing and reappearing before dissolving completely into MGR’s atmospheric mist. “For me, these songs evoke more of a feeling than a concept—making this record was kind of a journey into and out of things making sense. I would always have some core idea to start with and then just keep adding layers onto it until I was finally happy with the outcome. However, often during this process the songs would start to make absolutely no sense to me and I would end up just chasing my own tail until I found a way to bring it all together. I do feel that the music and the titles of the CD and songs are extensions of this feeling, but I don’t know if someone would walk away from listening to it with that in mind.”

For the first time in Gallagher’s solo work, echoes of Isis occasionally ring across the stereo field—which makes sense when you think about it, if only because he wrote Wavering while Isis were working on last year’s critically acclaimed In The Absence Of Truth. “I’ve been in that band for almost ten years—if they haven’t influenced me, no one has,” he points out. “In the past, I made a pretty conscious effort to not have obvious elements of Isis in the music I make outside the band, but with this album I wasn’t so uptight about it, and I let some rather Isis-esque moments slip in.”

Elsewhere (on opening track “Allusions,” to be specific), the Capricollis Quartet play strings arranged and conducted by composer and sound designer Carlo Dean. Oxbow frontman and all-around esteemed gentleman Eugene Robinson provided titular assistance because he’s good like that.