One thing is for certain. We are not in Kansas anymore and Blake DeGraw isn’t either as his album “Three Experiments in A Capella” is one that follows its own yellow brick road to an Emerald Kingdom that is, in all likelihood, closed for repairs.
As the title of this album might suggest, the three extended songs – if songs are what they are intended to be – are constructed from many a looped human voice like some Gregorian chant that has been denied a spiritual connection and instead lives out its sonic existence is a cave full of the echoes of itself. That may sound unappealing to the ears of those of us adapted and addicted to the three minute pop song but it is possible that making sense of all that is looped and overlaid does indeed have some artistic value even if thinking of such a thing may simply be the result of a transcendental state induced by considering the intellectual parallels between Blake DeGraw’s music and the more avant-garde end of the modern classical music spectrum.
Nonetheless, despite the arthouse pretensions that underpin and motivate these three songs, it is hard to deny that there is something hypnotic about Blake DeGraw’s music. I would not imagine for a moment that your average Joe would enjoy or understand “Three Experiments in A Capella” yet, now and always, the human voice, even if looped into wordless torment, is often all you need to get by.
Available from Bandcamp and other digital places.