Better known for his work as the genre-defying Pando, Massachusetts experimentalist Adam Bryant has taken sparse, expressionistic Americana as the basis for his work as Cave Dweller and used it to fully explore the fear and loneliness at the heart of himself, of the listener and of America as a whole.
The ten offerings that make up Walter Goodman are largely dissimilar and span from delicately fingerpicked classicalism (“Why He Kept The Car Running”) to blue-collar spoken-word (“Upon These Tracks”), but Bryant’s earnestly pained voice, and his sputtering bursts of electronica and white noise, convey a strong and deliberate narrative throughout.
In its finest moments, like the darkly mesmeric “The Call” and the flighty idyll that is “Bliss”, Cave Dweller approaches the timeless perfection of folk’s old masters, and Walter Goodman moves from being an intriguing oddity to one of the finest outside folk records of recent times.