Locust Land by Bill MacKay
An artist who is “all about the work” is usually as much a cliché as an artist with inner demons, although notably less harmful to anyone else in the vicinity. Yet Bill MacKay, a Chicago-based musician known best for his guitar fluency, might actually be driven by little more than the sounds he finds interesting.
Locust Land, his first proper solo album since 2019’s Fortune Fire, mixes his improvisational and experimental tendencies with an overall geniality. That latter quality comes through succinctly on the album’s second track, “Keeping in Time,” a folk song that finds MacKay ambling, with loose limbs and tight strums, around a patio where John Sebastian could have lounged, barefoot, five decades ago.
MacKay distinguishes himself from that era with a flat voice that readily disappears into the emotions of the moment; he distinguishes himself more sharply by planting his humble vocals amid colorful musical blossoms.
Some have thornier stems: in “Phantasmic Fairy,” the track before “Keeping in Time,” MacKay sets distant, heavily echoed flamenco meditations against circular synthesizer patterns and Procol Harum organ fills, while in “Glow Drift,” the track after “Keeping in Time,” he buoys a Deadhead traveling jam atop a rhythm with affinities to Arto Linsday’s bossa nova explorations.
Those explorations formed some of Lindsay’s most amiably challenging work, and MacKay is very much like that here, perhaps because he keeps his creativity churning between his own albums by doing so much other work elsewhere, including 2019’s “STIR,” a collaboration with genre-blurring cellist Katinka Kleijn, and 2021’s “Keys,” a collaboration with banjoist Nathan Bowles.
Concluding with the agnostic hymn of “Neil’s Field” and the country-rock introspection of the title track, MacKay makes Locust Land the kind of music that reveals a little more with each listen. He does seem to be genuinely all about the work, and he makes the listener’s effort the opposite of a chore.
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