'Retrorflector' by Andrew Trim
The title Retroreflector prompts wonder about what guitarist Andrew Trim is reflecting on retrospectively. His quartet’s slyly infectious title-tune groove leads you Pied Piper-like behind textural footsteps sketched out with nifty power chords.
To me, this backwards-glancing album title first lands upon Hendrix, as in “slight return,” a la “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” the coda to his masterpiece Electric Ladyland.
Yet Trim doesn’t lean too heavily on the Hendrix mystique. He’s carving out his own space inhabited by both pugnacious power chording and poetry. Speaking of poetry, the second tune, “Swirl,” evoked for me one of my favorite verses, Herman Melville’s “Shiloh,” a politically pointed reflection on a graveyard of perpetually sleeping Civil War soldiers. The poem almost sneaks up on its tragedy with a swirl of sympathy: Skimming lightly, wheeling still/ the swallows fly low/ over the field were April rain/ Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain…”
Trim endows “Swirl” with a certain grace—a tentative melancholy buoyed by lyrical wonder. I hope other listeners find enough in Trim’s artistry to pursue this, if not other poetic or artistic analogues. This veteran Milwaukee guitarist has developed into one of the region’s most original instrumental voices, one deeply infused with a latter-day, anti-sainthood of psychedelia.
And yet, I detect a wide range of other possible influences, perhaps most strikingly Bill Frisell’s haunted pastoral jazz, on “Lullabye.” Elsewhere, consider Pat Metheny’s bright-beaming electronica or, by contrast, the defiant Black-rock of the guitar-led trio Harriet Tubman.
Ultimately Trim’s work, for its tough harmonic brio, also reaches for his own brand of beauty, that which dwells in the deep cavern between raw, unmined sound and sunlit silhouettes.
An album release party is scheduled at Anodyne, 224 W. Bruce St., on July 27.
