Album Review
Bexar Bexar, an exploratory instrumental folk artist from Austin, Texas, gratifies listeners with only mystifying background ambiance and overlapping guitar tracks. Content with sparse instrumentation in his most recent album Tropism, he effectively addresses loneliness with all its complexities – curiosity, anxiety and deserted-ness.
The ten tracks on Tropism blur together, allowing the album to seem something fluid and less linear – they all dip and wave, rather than exist as ten separate, unrelated songs. Tracks like “Listening to Your Party”, “The Messy Message”, and “Little More South” provide haunting, aquatic-like ambiance with melancholic guitar movements – creating a heavier, darker constituent of the album. Conversely, “Sweet Devil”, “Oil Thumbprints” and “Unsettled and Unable” are more buoyant and have a swelling eagerness set mainly by their warm tones and sonorous ambient noises.
The album ends with “Unsettled and Unable” – one of the more curiously optimistic tracks of the album, it alleviates listeners from the sadness and slog offered by some of the previous songs and serves as the epiphany of the album, bringing closure to the melodic voyage.
Bexar Bexar’s minimalist approach to the instrumental music genre is refreshing and uncluttered, allowing the listener to take equal part in telling the album’s story and relating to it on an individual level.