Spectreview: Noah Gundersen – Lover

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“All the wild horses, just want to run free
I want to know you
I just want you to know me, too”

Nearly every artist imagines themselves in the midst of a breakthrough, a moment when all the passionate hard work pools together in a great surge of light and the world at large suddenly takes interest. Seattle’s Noah Gundersen found himself in this position when his music started gracing TV screens nationwide early this decade, and ever since then he’s moved from humble beginnings as frontman of little-known indie folk band The Courage to a high-profile singer-songwriter whose recent albums garnered interest from the likes of legendary producer Bob Ludwig. Gundersen’s been playing shows since Seattle was in the height of the indie folk movement, when acts like The Head And The Heart, J. Tillman and Fleet Foxes were capturing national attention, and his brand of solemn folk occasionally feels like an artifact of that time, but there’s no denying that Gundersen understands where his strengths lie. His sharp, quavering voice is a natural wonder honed by intense practice, and combined with his capacity for emotive storytelling Gundersen’s songs having the ability to cut right through your bones. 2015’s Carry The Ghost may be the most potent combination of these traits, as its sparse environment, adorned with deftly-played guitar, made an ideal bed for Gundersen’s voice to work its magic.

Lover is similar to his previous albums in its balladry, but something feels a little different now, perhaps a little more commercial. Noah isn’t a stranger to light experimentation- his last album, 2017’s WHITE NOISE, flirted with the punch of rock instrumentation- but on “Out of Time” we hear the blunt metallics of a drum machine for the first time, and on the queasy, Bon Iver-esque title track and the steadily-building “Crystal Creek” Gundersen’s voice sizzles with newfound touches of Auto-Tune and vocoder. It’s not a radical change in sound by any means, and there’s occasionally the sense that Gundersen is creeping ever closer to the homogeneity of the popular sphere, but for the most part his unique charms remain intact. Noah’s songs are a little like magic eye paintings, in that they’re built from recognizable patterns that are spread too thin for comprehension but leave powerful images to those that view them at the right angle. Here’s it’s no different, and Lover’s strongest tracks live in the directness Gundersen does so well while leaning into the potential of studio treatment, like on “Audrey Hepburn,” where smart bits of sampling and the tender whisper of featuring singer Whitney Ballen turn an otherwise rote sepia photograph into a painterly page of a pop-up book. These are offset by songs like “Older,” where Gunderson, voice swathed in pitch affectation, seems to carry almost none of his defining qualities and lets the glorious instrumental accompaniment overshadow him. This makes for an altogether uneven listen, but the best moments on Lover rank among Gunderson’s finest, and those moments, along with some top-notch production and the resilient magic of that voice, make it definitely worthy of a good listen.

Recommended for the annual test of your waterworks.