Prisyn

Album review

Evan Patterson has always kept the experimental side of Jaye Jayle's music at the margins -- until Prisyn. On Patterson's fourth album, the electronics and ominous atmospheres that updated the Americana traditions of No Trail and Other Unholy Paths in fascinating ways make up the dark heart of this album's shadowy collages. This change in approach came partly out of necessity: Patterson's first Jaye Jayle album made without his backing band since 2014's It's Jayle Time!, Prisyn grew out of demos he sketched on his phone while on tour, then sent to Ben Chisholm to embellish, and finished in the studio with longtime collaborator Warren Christopher Gray. Given its largely solitary creation, it's not surprising that Prisyn finds Patterson musing on artificial constraints ranging from the addictive nature of technology to repressive cultural norms. On "Don't Blame the Rain," he tears into suffocating Southern conservatism over synths that sound like they're hurtling through space; on "From Louisville," creeping electronic textures meet hymnal lyrics in a striking expression of the dark side of traditions. Despite Prisyn's focus on confinement, its music is anything but restrained. The album's production and sound design are often stunning, particularly on the ghostly yearning of "I Need You," where horror movie strings, worming synth bass, and the decrepit plink of a piano evoke The Downward Spiral more than any of Patterson's previous music. Though the rich songcraft of his earlier work is missed a little, he takes his storytelling gifts in directions that echo Prisyn's boundless experimentation. "The River Spree" could be a short story tracing Patterson's surreal exploration of Berlin with sonics that ratchet up tension as they follow his path through the city streets, a bar, and parts unknown. His misadventures on the road make for some of the album's most striking moments. His dusty drawl sounds brilliantly wrong next to the smooth synths on "Making Friends," marking him as an outsider as he realizes, "now you know too much to let me go." Sounds and images alternately blur into each other and achieve a hyperreal clarity on "Guntime," a song based on a real-life incident where a car full of teenagers pointed an Uzi at the Jaye Jayle tour van as they entered Paris. Even more audacious than No Trail and Other Unholy Paths, Prisyn proves Jaye Jayle's music can thrive as Patterson lets tradition go by the wayside.
© Heather Phares /TiVo