Review: Noah Gundersen – A Pillar of Salt

Sometimes you can lose something that is still right there in front of you. A city you called home; a person who once felt as close to you as the wind on your face; a chapter of your life that still seems fresh in your memory, even if it’s long gone. These are the people and places and things that seem to form the beating heart of Noah Gundersen’s sublime fifth album, called A Pillar of Salt. It’s an album about bright little lost things; about flickers of memory so vivid that they seem like they’re happening now; of recollections or fragments of dreams that hurt like a dagger in your side because they remind you how much things have changed. Gundersen has always been good at conveying that type of loss: Of writing songs about lost loves that feel like cigarette smoke in your chest, or of capturing the very rhythm of autumn in his words and music. But it’s possible he’s never assembled a set of songs as stunningly beautiful and as disarmingly visceral as the 11 tracks that make up A Pillar of Salt. It’s an album that blindsides you, and that might just leave you gasping for air. I have not been able to go more than 24 hours without listening to it since I first heard it three weeks ago.

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Review: Noah Gundersen – Lover

Noah Gundersen Lover

I’ve interviewed Noah Gundersen two times in the past and both conversations centered around his restlessness concerning his art. The first time I spoke with him, ahead of the release of 2015’s Carry the Ghost, he told me how his debut album, the previous year’s folk-steeped Ledges, no longer reflected who he was or the music he wanted to make. In 2017, when we chatted about his audacious, adventurous third LP White Noise, it was the songs from the spiritually fraught Ghost that he was ready to move on from. “I just think I’m perpetually dissatisfied, which can be really frustrating,” he said. “But it also drives my creativity and my desire to do better and to make things that are better than what I’ve made in the past.”

On his fourth record, titled Lover (and released on the same day as an album by Taylor Swift that shares the exact same name), Gundersen seems perhaps more comfortable with letting his restlessness slide than he ever has before. The collection is at once both unique from everything he’s ever made previously and packed with songs that call back to previous moments from his catalog. There are raw acoustic songs that feel ripped from the cloth of the traditionally-hewn Ledges. Lead single “Robin Williams,” with its fractious electric guitar chords, plays like a twin to Carry the Ghost’s first single and lead-off track “Slow Dancer.” “Out of Time” initiates flashbacks to the Radiohead influences that blossomed all over White Noise. The entire Noah Gundersen toolkit, it seems, is fair game on this album.

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Review: Noah Gundersen – Carry the Ghost

Noah Gundersen - Carry the Ghost

Leading up to the release of Carry the Ghost, the second full-length album from Noah Gundersen, I was a little bit nervous. I loved Noah’s first LP, last year’s Ledges, so much that I couldn’t imagine the follow-up living up to my impossibly high expectations. If I had to pick a favorite record of the decade so far, Ledges would be it, so the thought of Gundersen making an album as good (or even better) was hardly something that I was even daring to hope for. Furthermore, the first track released from Carry the Ghost—the piano-led album opener “Slow Dancer”—showed that Noah was looking to flesh out his sound significantly on this record. Even on first listen, I really did love the song, but by the time an anguished electric guitar came ripping through the arrangement, I was worried that Carry the Ghost might fall victim to the pitfalls that singer/songwriters often encounter when they trade acoustic bedroom folk for lusher full-band textures. After all, we hadn’t heard a lick of electric guitar on Ledges.

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Review: Noah Gundersen – Ledges

Noah Gundersen - Ledges

There’s a moment near the beginning of Noah Gundersen’s fantastic debut album, called Ledges, where the singer/songwriter just lets loose. The song in question, a traditional Appalachian folk-like reverie called “Poor Man’s Son,” dwells for most of its runtime in a stripped down a cappella setting, Gundersen’s voice melding with his sister’s to create a sound that is instantly timeless. It feels like something that should have been on one of the T. Bone Burnett-helmed Coen Brothers soundtracks, Gundersen’s voice and style leaning more toward the recent Inside Llewyn Davis and his sister Abby’s Emmylou Harris impression – not to mention the song’s decision to directly quote from “Down in the River to Pray” – coming more from the fertile traditional music ground of O Brother Where Art Thou. The combination, frankly, is every bit as stunning as it sounds, with lyrics like “I’ve got money for food and a little bit of gasoline” gliding out like something that would have sounded equally at home in the Great Depression as it does in the current economic recession.

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