PERRI, SANDRO - In Another Life (LP+mp3) (Sealed) (LP)

The first solo album from Sandro Perri since 2011's acclaimed Impossible Spaces (Best New Track, Top 50 Albums Of The Year - Pitchfork) features Dan Bejar (Destroyer) and Andr? Ethier (The Deadly Snakes) as guest lead vocalists on the three-part opus "Everybody's Paris". Perri has been called "one of the most singular producers in contemporary music" (Boomkat) and his long affiliation with Constellation through various electronic and singersongwriter guises (Polmo Polpo, Glissandro 70, Off World) has produced a uniquely adventurous and iconoclastic discography. In Another Life expands on this in peerless fashion. The new album is what Perri describes as "an experiment in `infinite' songwriting." The title track is a 24-minute pop mantra for sequenced synth, piano, guitar and voice, progressing sideways rather than forward. A relaxed three-chord vamp runs the length of the album's Side One, peppered with Sandro's languid, lilting vocal and adorned with continually developing musical details - massaging the listener with the joys of repetition while defying stasis and monotony. Side Two of In Another Life features a similar approach, though in a distinct 3-part series: "Everybody's Paris" begins with Perri on vocals, with the mic then handed over to Andr? Ethier (The Deadly Snakes) and Dan Bejar (Destroyer) respectively, who each take a vocal turn singing lyrics of their own. Sandro calls this "a song-cycle designed to accept any lyrical variation fed into it: a fill-in-the-blanks questionnaire in the form of a song." The result is a gently yet enormously affecting album that basks thoughtfully and discerningly in a slow, sweet melancholia. In Another Life is a supremely listenable return to form for Sandro Perri, the music like a temporal analogue to a tender nature tableau registering slight changes under shifting light and a meditative gaze: at once appearing to signify only itself, while auguring the promise of harmonious life. RIYL: Van Morrison, Morton Feldman, Destroyer, Bill Callahan, Yo La Tengo, Arthur Russell!