Photos by Emily Quirk and Jamie Wdziekonski
Underneath thick swirls of rising fog, Alex Brettin, stone-still except for the occasional head bop acknowledgement of the buttery groove simmering under his sneakers, is pulling off his nightly escape artist routine: threading his band through the tightly drawn maze of songs he’s crafted as Mild High Club. Skiptracing, his second under the name, is at first listen a pleasantly disarming collection of psychedelic noodlings, deep funk syncopations spilling over with chorus-effected twelve-string trickery in the vein of current American Indie guitar maestros Mac DeMarco or HOMESHAKE. But live, the sounds finally breathing in the open air instead of cramming themselves directly into your ear canal, inflections of samba and jazz harmony sneak into the picture. Delicate drips of organ go toe-to-toe against frictionless bass melodies. And watching Brettin’s hands glide over the fretboard to pick, pluck, and slash his way through disorienting lick after lick (overheard during “Homage”: “damn that’s so TASTY”), the sense that any of this music fell to earth fully formed, floats away into the fog as well. In between the reference points that swarm like vultures around Mild High Club, Alex Brettin has found a dizzying array of infectious ways to turn pop into jazz and back again. Judging by the looks of the denim-jacketed swarm drifting through his melodies at Brighton Music Hall, the Club is raking in new members.
In between gusts of noise from what feels like a parade of MBTA buses on Brighton Ave, Alex maps out the touchstones of Skiptracing, a concept album whose story revolves around an LA detective on the hunt for the “spirit of American music”. Some dots on that landscape, like Steely Dan, are almost impossible to miss. But George Jones for the song “Chasing My Tail”? “Now that guy did some seriously indie shit,” he says, with a sternness that takes me back, before cracking into a smile. It’s refreshing to hear Alex joke about revivalism so candidly, especially considering that Timeline often felt like an extended 60s acid flashback. “I felt like even though my compositional wit had expanded [on Skiptracing], I still wanted to hear certain rhythms and harmonies that have already been left behind,” he explains, “But it’s all for laughs. I don’t take nostalgia too seriously.”
While he insists that he wasn’t cut out for the jazz world after studying guitar at Columbia College (“I couldn’t hang, didn’t have the chops, and had absolutely no desire to play other people’s songs”), the complex compositional process Alex undertook for the album was an academic exercise, with a dash of his giddy playfulness for good measure. “The songs were written in the order that they’re in on the album,” he says, straining his mellow tenor against the roar of a packed 66. “I would get to the end of a song and use the last chord to lead into the first chord of the next song. It was an exercise in transforming progressions that aren’t exactly foreign to people’s ears and stretching that across a record.” When I point out to him that the arrangements felt more complex this time around, he chuckles and goes one step further, saying that he wants to do an “Ellington, big band style” album next. As far as he’s concerned, he’s still splashing around in unfamiliar waters: “Timeline was me putting a toe in the water, Skiptracing is me diving in, and on the next one, I’ll finally be doing laps.”
But Alex is hardly letting himself drift off in the current. For the guy who took a full year of convincing from Stones Throw label boss Peanut Butter Wolf to finish his first album, the second had him eager to stretch his capabilities within and beyond the realm of songwriting. “Kokopelli”, a shimmering love-letter to those music obsessed homebodies who’d rather be buried under piles of vinyl than face the daylight, was an emotionally overwhelming experience to record, so much so that he recorded it out of sequence, breaking his self-imposed mold for the album. “Keep shuffling, because tuneage beats suffering,” Brettin croons, gliding across those keys with easy grace. But in the studio, he slogged through the lyrics, putting them together over a 14-hour session. After hitting the final vocal modulation that ends the song, he had to rush outside to hold back tears. He also directed the video for the title track and lead single, showing off his warped sense of nostalgia by making it on 8mm film. “I wanted to do a ridiculous, fake Godard video for it,” he says, a proud grin emerging, “We bought 3 rolls of film, 3 minutes each, went out on a Sunday and had a beach party.” At the end, we even get a knowing smile and exaggerated wave from Brettin himself, lounging on the beach in a propeller hat.
Before we split, I know that I have to ask him about the name; he’s already slipped in one too many puns (he described playing in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil as being “un-Rio”) and it’s been gnawing away at me. Turns out, he’s got a pretty hardline stance on puns. “Being obsessed with puns is a disorder,” he says, completely deadpan, before snapping back to his usual cheery disposition to admit that he didn’t come up with the name, instead borrowing it from one of his disordered, pun-obsessed friends. But do the druggy associations bug him? “I’m stoned right now, so not at all,” he chuckles. “I’m really privileged to explore music the way I do, with the friends I have. It’s a blessing and a curse to have that kind of scrutiny, but I can’t take it too seriously.” Later that night, when he’s presiding over an impressively high crowd surging and swaying to the beat with mile-wide smiles, I can’t imagine why he’d ever sweat it.
Alex recommends listening to Kiefer’s latest record, Kickinit Alone, out on Leaving Records, as well as reading Michel Houellebecq’s “Elementary Particles” (“Greatest ending to a book I’ve ever read”)
