“Pick pick glideeeeee,” calls the guitar as arpeggiated chords warmly tap dance over the fretboard. Tremolos swing left and right while hammers waltz on and off the strings with fluidity. That dance is shared with another guitar, one that sings with more restraint as it gently signals a cadence for the first to follow. Sometimes the chords are broken. Other times, they are radiantly full. Sometimes the two guitars harmonize, while other times see them at edge as one jaunts across scales and the other turns to rhythm.
Room is the simply titled collaboration between jazz virtuoso and Wilco guitarist Nels Cline and child prodigy turned jazz-circuit veteran Julian Lage. The duo keep their recording sparse, featuring only the pair as they play off of one another in what sounds like... well... an empty room. That isn’t to say their songs are empty, but they play into an emptiness that can feel both emphasized and denied as the album goes on.
Their songs are the most sparse towards the opening of the album. Room starts with a series of competing guitar lines, where Cline’s more pronounced guitar jumps across scales while Lage’s guitar struts across the bass strings. Their combinations are admirable, but feel more like improvised braggadocio rather than thought-out constructions. On Room, Cline and Lage don’t really fill out their ideas into more than just fills, though those fills radiate with electricity and eccentricity.
It’s when they tune their songs to the other’s dance that Cline and Lage fill their room. Lage often tones down his bass note bourrées to allow Cline’s leads to take center stage, though they’ll be just as likely to strum in tandem as much as they’ll carry each other. While opening songs like “Abstract” had the duo playing strengths in restrained chaos, it’s in finale songs like “Freesia / The Bond” where the two bring together their talent rather than show off to one another. The chords hum with warmth while the leads tone it back to embrace that warmth rather than outpace it.
And when those guitars come together, that empty Room is filled with somber bliss. The guitars guide each other through the emptiness with precise pirouettes and wild west waltzes, singing their stories into each other’s harmonic rhythms. Room may tear itself up in an opening salvo of theatrics, but by the end, things are left as cozy as chords humming on an acoustic guitar, ringing in the space of a once-barren room.
Rating: B
