Window In The Rhythm

The past becomes part of the future on Window in the Rhythm, a career-defining double album (on white vinyl) statement from singer, songwriter, and producer Fred Thomas.

With an acclaimed trilogy of solo albums released with Polyvinyl (2015’s All Are Saved, 2017’s Changer, and 2018’s Aftering), Thomas aimed to compress his disparate musical leanings and the rawest of his feelings into one interlocking whole. Six years after completing that beautifully scattered sonic scrapbook, Window in the Rhythm overhauls Thomas’ self-inspectionary sound-world with an approach unlike anything he’s attempted before.

Exactly one hour of music is split up into just seven songs. Having gotten the two-minute pop songs out of his system with his band Idle Ray, Thomas opens up into spacious environments with patient, steady tempos and carefully mapped arrangements. Lonely nylon-string guitars and field recordings transition into enormous, rippling waves of slowcore distortion and buried electronic textures. Drummer/composer Quin Kirchner’s controlled playing guides the rhythms, friends like Raw Honey’s Maggie Hopp, Michigan multi-instrumentalist Mary Fraser, and Australian songwriter Elena Dakota all contribute guest vocals, and not one but two harpists show up; Mary Lattimore weaving ambient softness on one track and Shelley Burgon’s unrelenting double harmonics driving the intensity of another. The album takes its time unpacking itself, with purposeful atmospherics and song construction evoking the same tense brilliance found on Portishead’s Third, Bjork’s Vespertine, or key moments from the Microphones’ early output, and Thomas going deep into his own emotional topography in the same way as Joanna Newsom’s masterful epic Ys. 

Window in the Rhythm flows more like a film than the usual album experience. Even closing track “Wasn’t” washes by organically over the course of its nearly 15-minute runtime, starting out like a straight-ahead rock song and slowly dematerializing into torrents of unstructured free drumming and clouds of deep synth bass. It’s seven drawn-out songs that breeze by quickly like a distracted afternoon, reflecting the way that Thomas uses this music to see just how thin he can stretch his memories without breaking them.