Diggers Factory – 02 APR 2021
Paul Bergmann delves into psych tinged phantasmagoria with new album.
Across his previous releases, American artist Paul Bergmann has explored a broad spectrum of musical styles. His multifaceted output has seen him adopt the guise of melancholic Indie songster, dreampop chanteur and conversational acoustic singer songwriter. On his latest release, The Other Side, he has crafted an album that evokes the spectral backdrop of a vivid if transitory daydream. Rich, spaced out and sensuous, across the nine tracks the listener is as though privy to snatches of an overheard or perhaps imagined, conversation. The delicate verisimilitude of the oneiric plane proving illusory when grasped at.
There is a heady, hallucinatory fog introduced in the short opening instrumental number, “Change From the Rust.” This underlying fuzz, like the static of a grainy piece of found footage, percolates throughout the subsequent tracks. The vocals sit submerged within the sweeping accompaniment, at times prominent and at others audible if not fully decipherable. Initially I found this aesthetic somewhat off putting but the key here is not to invest too heavily in what is being said, rather to allow the counter valent sonic textures to wash over you. When the lyrics do come through they display an eye for the absurd and the darkly comic. Such is the case on “Oh My Love” which reinterprets the fairy-tale of Rapunzel. ‘Lay out your hands for me, your ham hock hands… they crack so easily.' All of which sits atop the development of slow cymbal splashes, which provide a bulwark to guitar that is simultaneously droney and forebodingly epic.
The titular track is structured around a slightly unsettling, impellent guitar part married with sardonic distorted vocals. The anguished tone reminiscent of the delivery of Conor Oberst. Throughout there is a propensity for odd shifts in pitch, with notes stretched and strung out. Nods to psych-rock bump against chamber-pop interludes in an amalgam of mournful delirium. “Homeward Bound” is by far the longest song, clocking in at just under eight minutes. It merges the slightest hint of drums tapping away in the background with layers of echoic glacial voices. Penultimate track “Bring on the Rain” counterpoises a spoken word rumination on existence with a dreamy, blissed out backing track.
This is an intriguing if at times slightly challenging record. Bergmann has successfully encapsulated a mood of the uncanny. The frayed edges of a splintered and questioning investigation of the self emerges through the haze of woozy feedback. Yet there are moments of penetrating insight and the totality is underpinned by a carefully rendered and singular vision. The Other Side is a novel and off kilter record, dense and at times disorienting but undeniably original.