Fred Thomas : Window in the Rhythm


Midway through “Embankment,” the first song on Window in the Rhythm, Fred Thomas is fixated on a Squarepusher song. He records “A Journey to Reedham (7AM Mix)” four times, “but not in a row,” onto the same mix he’s making for someone, “Sometimes the whole thing/Sometimes just a part,” as a way of reckoning with the messiness and randomness of life and death. It’s not clear who the tape’s for, but this act of haphazard-if-intentional dubbing happens in the act of making sense of the loss of a friend, Geoff, who died of carbon monoxide poisoning in December 1997, at just 26 years old. (Squarepusher’s Big Loada, featuring “Reedham,” incidentally, came out only a few months earlier.) It’s an attempt to process grief without a roadmap, an act of a young person trying and struggling to come to grips with tragedy, and “Falling apart in the presence of angels.“
Vivid details like these are to be found throughout Window in the Rhythm: black bedsheets as makeshift doors, dirty tie-dyed t-shirts, gray water in a vase, a dead bird on a sidewalk. All seemingly mundane landmarks from a youth that Thomas revisits with empathy, affection, and more than a twinge of heartbreak. Now in his forties, Thomas has since become a prolific artist and songwriter since those youthful days working in a record store in Ann Arbor and playing in his earliest bands. He’s been a member of Saturday Looks Good to You and His Name Is Alive and released over a dozen solo albums—most of them sharp and concise indie rock records like Changer and Aftering, some of them experimental synth recordings—along with his most recent work as a member of indie pop trio Idle Ray. But even considering his prolific two-plus decades of making music covering as much ground as it does, Window in the Rhythm still feels like a breakthrough moment, Thomas surveying times long past through seven mostly lengthy songs—only one of them under five minutes, and just barely—that survey his own transformation, scars cultivated and wisdom earned. It’s his most emotionally raw statement, beautifully written and gracefully executed.
The songs on Window in the Rhythm tend to flow in stream-of-consciousness manner, but often crafted with a cinematic sense of grandeur. In doing Thomas enlists the aid of a number of guest musicians who help flesh these songs out from gentle folk plucks into bigger, masterfully expanding arrangements. Jazz drummer Quin Kirchner lends a sparse, light-touch rhythm to the elegiac air of “Embankment,” which is given added dimension through Emily Roll’s backing vocals. And the stark and gentle “Electric Guitar Left Out in the Street” is made all the more otherworldly through the flutter of Mary Lattimore’s harp, making weightless a song that hangs heavy with regret: “A neglected archive of dreams/An electric guitar left out in the street/Are you sure you don’t want to keep that thing?“
It’s not always clear who the subject is or to what degree these stories are drawn from real experiences, but the feelings they conjure and evoke are definitely real—whether they happened exactly how he describes them or not doesn’t negate the fact that they’re loaded with truth. The 10-minute saga of “Coughed Up a Cufflink” documents a relationship’s collapse through nights slept on floors and 800-mile drives, gentle nylon-string strums and booming avalanches of drums. It’s another moment in which time and distance reveals a truth that a younger self couldn’t see, an inability to notice a desperate cry for help, “Because I cared so much more/About having a girlfriend than understanding the person you were/Or the dictum of hurt/That you learned in the house where you grew up.” It’s a breathtaking showcase of both songwriting and storytelling, and it’s utterly devastating.
Amid the dizzying recollections of events that left an indelible tattoo on Thomas’ memory, he reaches a new level of understanding, perhaps, but rarely a sense of closure. The sprawling, 14-minute closing track “Wasn’t” is the most overwhelming statement among the seven affecting and stunning songs here, sprinting through a recollection of living in a punk house, sense memories and the inevitable evolution from places you remember to places you no longer recognize, and the people you care about, but not in the way they need you to: “I loved you but only in the context of loneliness/trite and baseless/In the cowardly shelter of memory/And everything time erases.” Halfway through, the song eventually collapses into a long tail of fuzz and feedback, deconstructing itself, slowly falling apart, its thick wall of distortion ultimately being overtaken by the blissful transcendence of Shelley Burgon’s harp. Like the memories that Thomas races to index, “Wasn’t” slowly dissipates into a gauzy and amorphous haze, beautiful but imprecise, offering the simple acknowledgement, “But I was a different person then,” before slowly, inevitably disintegrating.
Label: Polyvinyl
Year: 2024
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Jeff Terich is the founder and editor of Treble. He's been writing about music for 20 years and has been published at American Songwriter, Bandcamp Daily, Reverb, Spin, Stereogum, uDiscoverMusic, VinylMePlease and some others that he's forgetting right now. He's still not tired of it.