Chuck Roth - Texture Songs Chuck Roth

"'I have this Pavlovian response where I just expel songs,’ Chuck Roth explains. For the New York-based guitarist, the LP format is less a definitive product than a snapshot of his daily life and growing artistic practice. With last year’s watergh0st songs, Roth was dedicated to 'mapping every voice, seeing where they come together and fall apart.' He’s more interested in materiality on his new album, the expressive and intimate Texture Songs. Across its seven tracks, he excavates the particularities of his Stratocaster, be it the guitar’s characteristic pickups or capacity for volume swelling. Traces of some Texture Songs have existed for at least five years, evolving with every live performance, but their presentation on this album represents Roth in the now. At times that means technique. 'Gun' is built on a curiosity for hitting harmonics on the bottom string, letting them ring out, while 'Siren' is similarly defined by sustained buzzing sounds while string crossing. 'I get really into the shape of each note,' he says. You can sense that curiosity in the album’s raw presentation, where every song invites a full feeling of every plucked note, every slide across the fretboard. On the shapeshifting 'Highway,' it sounds like you’re there in the room with him, hearing his breath, sensing the shape of every chord, tracing each split-second change in attacking the guitar. Roth has felt most comfortable talking about his work with painters and visual artists, favoring descriptions via color and brightness over any technical language. It relates to his belief that music can be totally self-sufficient in its meaning-making. While Roth sings on these tracks, he explains that 'it’s actually the music that describes the emotions I’ve had.' Lyrics, then, are meant to 'decorate the border of a song’s emotion without dictating it.' He likens the voice to a drummer’s specific kick pattern: it’s a conduit for counterpoint, conjuring greater specificity in the feelings evoked. Take 'Hometown Hero,' which is rooted in observations made on daily walks to work. In seeing his city change, he constructed the song as a 'violent document,' something heard in its damaged guitar chords and turbulent vocal melodies. 'Siren' is the inevitable aftermath: the apathy and detachment that arrives as a means of survival. While relatively quiet, its harmonics’ smooth tones mask an underlying anxiety. Roth describes the beautifully complex 'Love Song' as a track made of code words, capturing his relationship with his partner in a language only they know. 'I'm trying to resist understanding my work,' he tells me. He and his music are in a constant feedback loop in this way, expanding and transforming in glorious, unknowable fashion." — Joshua Minsoo Kim