White Noise comes at the tail-end of my favourite musical trend of the mid-to-late 2010s: singer-songwriters who were already very good at their craft making something much more ambitious (see: Ben Howard, Dan Mangan). For Noah Gundersen,
Carry the Ghost signalled an identity crisis for the Washington star post-religious break-up, leaning flirtatiously into expansive full-band arrangements but never fully committing. You can interpret the bold, saturated synth note that starts
White Noise’s first track ‘After All (Everything All the Time)’ as a line in the sand between Gundersen’s past and his future—what comes to pass over the next 67 minutes is filled with similar script-rewriting bluster, experimentation, and confidence.
For all its ambition, the identity crisis remains: with tracks like ‘Fear and Loathing’, ‘Dry Year’, and ‘Bad Desire’, Gundersen revisits his singer-songwriter roots. ‘Cocaine, Sex & Alcohol (From a Basement in Los Angeles)’ ends with a Radiohead-aping improvised jam session that reads more like a tribute than an original, while the apocalyptic ‘Wake Me Up, I’m Drowning’ verges on sludgy, post-metal in its closing minutes. The inclusion of these disparate tracks on
White Noise, though they all succeed in their own right, is very confusing when appreciating the record as a whole—in fact, it can be downright disorienting. The lack of congruity in Gundersen’s genre-confused track listing becomes more charming over time, however: it begins to read like a love letter to the diverse set of influences that shaped Gundersen, and if you are able to hear
White Noise as such, the whiplash goes away fairly quickly.
White Noise, like any Gundersen album prior, succeeds because of Gundersen’s vocal performance. His usual gut-punch wordplay becomes less of a feature as he creates room in the bigger arrangements for longer, legato vocal lines. An increased use of dynamic range—the whispers, falsetto harmonies, bellows, and crooning—pairs exceptionally well with the studio treatment: a complete tour of every re-amped effects unit available to producer Nathan Yaccino. In the album’s strongest songs (‘After All (Everything All the Time)’, ‘Heavy Metals’, ‘Sweet Talker’), the album becomes just as much Yaccino’s as it is Gundersen’s. Balancing so many layers of influences and sounds is a tight-rope walk, and its success on
White Noise’s strongest entries should be career-defining moments for Gundersen. The big pop melodies, the heavy kick-ins, the dense synths, the atypical use of strings, and the sheer unfettered nature of
White Noise—it’s a treat to listen to. Gundersen’s distinctive style as a songwriter is never lost, and his ambition gets to be charmingly realized.
