Brooklyn band Wilder Maker’s principal songwriter, Gabriel Birnbaum says that the group’s latest full-length, The Streets Like Beds Still Warm follows “an overall formal asymmetry, like dream logic.” It is richly textured, moody, and deep and is as distinctly narrative as it is literally experimental. To call it a concept album, as big as that term is, would actually be to sell it short. It is, in fact, only the first part of a concept trilogy that tells the tale of one long night in the city, from dusk to dawn. The album follows a lonely narrator as he drifts down avenues and in and out of bars and hospital rooms. If this sounds a bit noirish, that’s because it is. “Film noir detectives always start out looking immaculate, but by the end of the film they have a torn collar, a black eye, their slacks are stained, and they’ve started slapping people around in desperation,” Birnbaum says. “Are they the good guy anymore? I find this fascinating and I love the visual cues reflecting the internal landscape.”
While there are no visual cues, per se, on The Streets Like Beds Still Warm, the record owes a great debut to cinematography. Impressionistic swirls of effected guitar, drums, and saxophone support Birnbaum’s husky and worldweary baritone croon which sometimes echoes Bill Fay. But at times, in all its dim-lit barroom storytelling, one may think of Tom Waits. It’s a comparison that threatens both to mislead and sell short, but it’s difficult not to see things while listening to The Streets Like Beds Still Warm –– perhaps a slowly swinging Tiffany lamp just above the narrator’s head as he’s a little more than half-drunk, scrawling a brilliantly poetic, antiheroic tale on a bar napkin. Be assured, though, this is not The Heart of Saturday Night and it’s not In the Wee Small Hours. In fact, The Streets Like Beds Still Warm’s musical precedents come from distinctly different corners of the musical universe. The band draws direct influence from the work of alt-jazz contemporaries Anna Butterss and Jeff Parker as well as ambient progenitor Brian Eno. The Streets Like Beds Still Warm is, holistically, a statement of nocturnal and hypnotic storytelling –– a matter of both style and substance. Birnbaum’s investment in the narrative, which ultimately deals in humanity, is reflected by the dreamlike way the tunes themselves unfold. It could not work any other way. Deeply felt and finely focused, undeniably listenable but difficult to pin down, The Streets Like Beds Still Warm is beautifully strange –– and it feels like just the kind of thing likely to receive the praise it deserves a decade down the road.