Eric Chenaux Say Laura

180gLP in 350gsm jacket w/colour flood interior + 300gsm inner + 12"x24"poster + DL card.The new record by Eric Chenaux is his most immaculate and pristine. Say Laura perfectly incarnates the counter-intuitive interplay of instrument and voice that Chenaux has beenrevealing and revelling in throughout the past decade: his gently unhinged juxtaposition of resplendently smooth, seductively assured singing and puckish, frazzled, thoroughlydestabilized guitar could come from no other musician. The five wandering, wondering ballads on Say Laura bring Chenaux's semi-improvised but keenly intentional songwriting to its fullest, clearest, warmest and coolest articulation; uncompromising and generous, hyper-specific and loose, spartan and luxurious, elemental and ornate. Say Laura might as well be a jazz record_certainly as much as his previously acclaimedalbums Slowly Paradise and Skullsplitter tread that genre-adjacent territory_though it also features moments and melodies that come as close to pop flirtation as Chenaux is likely to get. But above all, Say Laura breathes like no other Chenaux album. Voice and guitar are inscribed with elemental clarity in a wondrously open, symbiotic sonic space. His pure tenor croon glides through a crisp, reverberant ether while his fried guitar careens dizzily and giddily, every gesture and timbre captured in unflinching detail by engineer Cyril Harrison. Chenaux has also made his most minimal, controlled, regulated and rhythmic record. Citing a spectrum of influences_Sun Ra, Jeanne Lee, Gang Starr, Charlie Parker, Betty Carter, EPMD and Thelonious Monk_Say Laura expands on a foot-pedal technique Chenaux has previously used here and there, taking things to a more programmatic level: beatscomposed on a Boss drum machine are used as noise gate triggers, slowed down and inserted into his guitar signal path to create tempered pulses. Opener "Hello, How? And Hey" immediately establishes these subtly heightened characteristics of elementalism, dualism and structure,...