Robert Earl Thomas

Another Age, the debut album from Robert Earl Thomas, avoids inhabiting clichés even as it embraces their personal influence, distilling plucky observations and reveries into something both universal and specific. As a narrator, he steers a road song away from jaded indifference, and his self-aware ballads are concerned not with broken hearts (or breaking them) but with city-induced anxiety, complex and unfamiliar love, and soft ruminations on getting older.

Thomas is not new to making records, and Another Age is actually years in the works. A founding member of Brooklyn-based indie outfit Widowspeak, he’s previously lent his talents as a lead guitarist. He began writing and home-recording songs two years ago, gradually and purposefully in moments of solitude between tours, between stints working in a Seattle woodshop and at a hotel in the Catskills, and during weeks couch-surfing back and forth across Brooklyn.

Thomas coaxes the listener in with idiosyncratic vulnerability, like a lounge singer raised on AM radio, bedroom arena rock without the bravado, or easy-listening with a little more at stake. And the stories he tells are full of intimate moments and observations: a walk home from a lover’s apartment, a long night drive back upstate, a quiet Wednesday morning existential crisis. Another Age is indoor music at its most expansive, rock and roll held at arm’s length.