Troubadour No. 1 makes one thing clear: Ocean Music—through its iterations as a chamber ensemble, a solo acoustic project, a full on band and now, this album—is, and always has been, about Richard Aufrichtig's voice. His expressive and powerful baritone is the singular force that connects the 7 very different tracks. His voice is the constant of the breath through a long meditation, beckoning the listener immediately, and inviting unsuspecting ears into a 7-track meditation on music itself.

It's just him and his guitar at first on the aptly named Blown Open, chanting evenly, conjuring a world where Gregorian monks also strummed a guitar from time to time. But 36 seconds in, clarinets eerily appear in tight harmony, ghosts swirling and swelling around Aufrichtig's lyrics. Suddenly, something different is going on. You want to be visited by those ghosts again, and you will be. As the song moves forward, Aufrichtig's voice is visited by an increasing coterie of musical instruments: a piano, electric guitar, vintage synth, and more. Forget the ghosts. The image of a twister advancing forward through Kansas, strengthening itself with random detritus in its path, comes to mind. And he moves into song two, Paris, with the full force of a tornado.

First, a word on this fabulous detritus. Troubadour No. 1 was born of a collaboration with celebrated producer Josh Kaufman (Bonnie Light Horseman, The National, The Hold Steady, The War on Drugs), and recorded in his Brooklyn studio. Aufrichtig and Kaufman initially bonded over a shared love for The Grateful Dead and the fact that they both worked in the same coworking space in Dumbo. The band includes Stuart Bogie (Angelique Kidjo, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Arcade Fire) and Ray Rizzo (early Drag City, Glen Hansard, Josh Ritter). Holly Miranda and Jeanna Phillips both lend their otherwordly vocals to the album. As you listen, you wonder when one of them might poke their head onto the track, and what instrument they'll be playing this time. The surprise entrances add a level of suspense and excitement.

By the end of Blown Open, it's been established that this album is more than just voice and guitar. And Paris, the clear standout, is unlike anything Aufrichtig's done before. This nontraditional pop song was originally written in 2012, as part of a project exploring 19th century poetry and its relation to Troubadours. Think Leonard Cohen meets Boney M on a night flight across the Atlantic. "Paris" will be equally at home blasting in a low-key club, or thrumming from your yoga instructor's iPhone speaker. With a steady drumbeat, bizarro flute riffs and sweet saxophone hits, its musical soundscape takes you far away. And Holly Miranda's vocals were actually recorded in Paris--neat!

The next two songs help bring you back down after the exhilaration of Paris. The song for which the album is named, "Troubadour No. 1" and the following "Blue October Sky," hit on the themes of the sun and the stars and music, and get to the heart of Aufrichtig's lyrical approach. He works in big, abstract images and colors: women, cities, the sky, the summer, singing, lyrics, music itself. It's abstract painting, profound in its simplicity.

If "Troubadour No. 1" and "Blue October Sky" serve up slow metaphors, "Telephone" is cruising down the highway of metonymy. We're zooming in from our widest lens that can take in the sun and the sky and earth and water in one view, and now we're making a collage of human body parts: we are reduced to our names, ages, eyes, arms and hands, but we aren't quite whole. If David Lynch had commissioned a Bruce Springsteen song, it might sound a little like this windows-down-hands-out-late-summer jam. Then "An Old Dream" removes all the rock and roll and pyrotechnics. It's just Aufrichtig and a piano, and you are somehow immediately confident that the ghostly woodwinds won't be visiting this time. After adding, adding, adding to the tornadic experience, it's a pleasant return to the stripped down voice that has been there at the center all along.

And "Watchlight" ends the album with a wink. Aufrichtig is letting you know that he knows how to write a classic folk song with a catchy hook. Maybe, if you ask him politely, he'll sing you a sweet ditty. But, as Troubadour No. 1 teaches us, perhaps we're better off receiving a strange, unexpected album that we didn't quite have the words to ask for.
credits