Review Summary: The Nashville guitarist explores the nature of impermanence on his stripped-back new EP.
Despite its foreboding title, William Tyler’s new EP does not recall a still life portrait that juxtaposes symbols of material wealth and death to make a grim point about the futility of extravagant living. Rather, the alt-country guitarist’s
New Vanitas is a calm meditation on the nature of growth and decay, explored through skeletal instrumentals that embrace simplicity and humility rather than busy ornamentation. Presented with a gorgeously timeworn production style, this scaled back mode suits Tyler wonderfully, resulting in perhaps his most emotional release to date.
The instruments float in and dissolve like apparitions: lonesome electric guitars shiver through pensive melodies on opener “With News About Heaven” and “Big Sky Waltz”, two of the simplest, and prettiest, songs Tyler has written yet. He shows his solo acoustic guitar range on “She Swims in Hidden Water” and “Time Indefinite”, the former a blushing folk ballad and the latter a chiming, open-tuned fingerpicking workout where droning lower strings build under a honeyed melody. The arrangement rarely strays from one or two guitars throughout, with occasional ambient flourishes that seem to rise organically from Tyler’s dynamic playing; paired with the reserved compositions, the results can be highly emotive, if not necessarily complex.
Tyler recently moved back to his hometown of Nashville to be closer to his parents during the pandemic, and he credits a subsequent reconnection with the “sonic building blocks” that initially inspired his own music—old cassettes of Protestant hymns, records that have seen decades of use, the fuzzy hiss of AM radio as dusk settles—for
New Vanitas’ homespun quality. These songs are steeped in the same grainy antiquity of those influences: see the gossamer “Slow Night’s Static”, with its radiowave mumbles over glacial electric guitars that decompose over twelve minutes, or the murky, layered drones that close the record out on “Pisces Backroads”. It’s moments like these that truly reinforce the EP’s themes of transience and the passage of time; but unlike the works which the record's named after, Tyler plays his songs with humble contentedness, even in the unblinking gaze of impermanence.
With a robust 39 minute runtime,
New Vanitas could easily hang with Tyler’s other full-lengths, but calling this an EP feels right—conceptually at least. Whereas his other albums leaned more into labyrinthine arrangements and compositions, this has the carefree feeling of someone capturing a fleeting melody moments after it came to them, resulting in songs that are deeply felt but not overthought. Ultimately, it’s that ephemeral spirit that gives
New Vanitas its unexpected weight.
4.0
