Chris Brokaw: Puritan (12XU)

One of our favorite rock records of 2021, hands down.

We’ve been fans of Chris Brokaw’s work since Codeine, but most especially after he assumed a more central songwriting role with Thalia Zedek in Come throughout the 1990s. Along with Unsane, Come remain one of the best bands in the Matador catalog, but that conversation will have to happen elsewhere.

In the last twenty years, Brokaw has worked increasingly under his own name as a bandleader and, it should be noted, one of the hardest working musicians in the business. His discography is wide ranging, in style, genre and mood. Brokaw has written film scores and collaborated with everyone from fallen punk deviants to the most well-respected musician’s musicians.

The songs on Puritan appear, upon first listen, fairly straightforward. Throughout the album this “purity” in arrangement and instrumentation highlight the familiar and core components of rock music. But it is within this structural bedrock (bass, drums, guitar, vox) that Brokaw’s craftsmanship and experience lift, strengthen and even rethink some of the most common ingredients in rock music.

For example, Brokaw uses minimalist repetition throughout (but especially on the title track “Puritan”), or stretches out an intro for many minutes before even beginning the song proper (with a chorus instead of a verse!!). Please reference “The Heart of Human Trafficking.” These slight and subtle moves bring a kind of concentrated heat to the rock template, shifting its purity into a style, or aesthetic.

The front cover also suggests Brokaw has turned himself into a kind of persona for rock puritanism (rock aestheticism??). The moody lighting and that guitar slung comfortably over his shoulder evoke this style. But the large white border, the font and even the shape of the photograph itself seem to suggest purity, history and the past. Brokaw’s current home of Cambridge, MA clearly telegraphs this history as well.

But like all ideologies, Puritan plays with expectations in the very same moments that they are reinforced, especially in terms of the rigid standards and rules at work within rock music. We all recognize this paradox in rock music, when its outlaw or rebellious origins cross over into standards, formula and, let’s be honest, cliches. Andy Hong’s mix and production helps to lay bare the starkness and clarity associated with so much post-rock (never felt comfortable with this tag, but Brokaw’s discography and early mature work remains linked to that style and period of music). The clarity of sound, even at its most noisy and rambunctious, emphasizes the structural core of a song, while highlighting the slight gestures and minor changes that help develop so much of the theme and meaning behind this album.

And the more one listens the more one can hear what is at work in these songs, both in terms of content and form. Like his fellow Bay Stater Thoreau, who famously declared, “I love a wide margin to my life,” Puritan exposes and reveals, if we lend it our focus and attention. The album’s use of distortion, silence and space offer some transcendental moments, that’s for certain.

And we haven’t even mentioned the melodies or the hooks … one can never forget these essentials

Buy with confidence!!