On Oct 28 Family Vineyard released “Three Chords and a Sword”, a collection of eight cover songs recorded by Alan Licht over a span of three decades. Re-imagining both Van Halen’s “Jump” and Sonic Youth’s “Tom Violence” from the perspective of American Primitive guitar soli, employing a chord organ to twist Pere Ubu’s “Heart of Darkness” and Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” into eerie, doom-laden ballads, conjuring the sound of New York’s Suicide with little more than a microphone and patch cord, each song emerges transformed. Even the rarely-heard Bob Dylan spoken word piece “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie” is markedly different from the original as heard in Licht’s voice. Licht’s interpretations echo from a childhood encounter with a Larry Rivers pop art painting drawn from a coloring book of Japanese art, which inspired the album cover.

In Sept 2024, Alan Licht returns with “Havens” (VDSQ), a sprawling double-disc set of exploratory guitar-based compositions forged from the myriad possibilities arising when strings collide with electricity & space. Licht is masterful and relentless in his negotiation of the often-unknowable intersections that exist between juxtaposing strands of sound. His work is marked by contrast & contradiction: maximalism versus minimalism; rockist inclinations versus avant, expanded-field expression; loose improvisation versus considered performance. What these dichotomies shouldn’t obscure, however, is the simple pleasure that transpires in his refracting of idiom, conjuring expansive pieces that collapse, stratify & convolve competing schools of music to wholly singular ends.
Havens documents a new sound for Licht, building on a previous VDSQ release “Currents,” his last major solo outing from 2015.
Playing those solo acoustic tracks live on tour, their lyricism translated through the power of a PA, Licht was taken by the overtones surging atop those song-like pieces, transforming them into something new. The compositions here, particularly the mesmeric title track, luxuriate in that newfound sense of possibility, infused with a rock-born urgency by way of lightning-fast, urgent strumming gradually unfurling layers of phantom harmonics. Celestial punk, if you will; guitar soli of such ever-surging vitality as to blur & distend dense chord shapes to phantasmagoric effect. The record is rich with considered, contained explosivity, firmly minimalist in its patient pace & ear for hallucination but expressed in defiantly, deliciously rock terms, each piece its own lyrical hybrid built of scant elements unfurled with painterly grace.
This is firmly a “guitar” record, despite what your ears might tell you; barring a short mellotron intervention, Havens is almost unbelievably wrought from guitar alone, ably deployed straight or perverted into abstracted spectres & illusions.