Bygones is huge. massive. and very self-aware of this. The opener, Overpass, begins like life itself, as essentially nothing, a barely-there buzz. Slowly it grows, becoming something with the capacity to sustain itself, driving forward, quickly switching from one section to anothed like a medley of itself. By the time the track reaches its end, I'm left feeling like I've just borne witness to an entire life, birth to death, and not through the lens of biography but something more visceral, like an omnipresent guardian angel.
The album is defined by massive liveliness. It's not often that you get an album which consistently creates such enormous space without sacrificing a little get-up-and-go.
Max uses a wide set of tools to accomplish this, reflecting his experience and intuition, well-developed by 2019, as a recording artist. Two of these tools deserve to be named: the acoustic guitar, and the synthesizer.
Let's start with the synthesizer, the more obvious tool for making aural space. I have no idea what synthesizer is on the album--the credits simply tell us that Nate Wagner and Robby Green play it at least sometimes on 7th Day, Mylena, and Yard Gnomes. I think if you keep your ears open for it, you'll find it more often than you might catch on a first impression. there's all these sounds throughout the album which range from warbly theramin, to smooth hums, to pitchy plunks. I think they're mostly synthesizer, though they could be otherwise--actual theramin, guitar through a pedal, a wickedly detuned piano. In fact, the subtelty and ambiguity of the synth makes it so effective in creating that space. the sounds simply are. my ears cannot ignore these sounds, and simultaneously can hardly bare to pick the songs apart enough to expose them.
Now, the acoustic guitar. When I think of the qualities of the acoustic guitar, I tend to think of it as kind of a closed, staccato instrument. its clicks and chick-chicks are almost like a shaker or a hi-hat. it's bordering on a percussion instrument. Max, it seems, sees it different. Bygones encourages us to be with the acoustic guitar and tune out the clicks and scrapes of the strings, and to instead notice for a second that the guitar holds a large cavity. The acoustic guitar on this album is impossibly reverberant. A trick of post-production and digital reverb? Maybe, but my ears really want me to believe that the guitar was recorded with 4 or 5 microphones inside the guitar, each one picking up a slightly different piece of the echoes.
