4 out of 5

Label: VHF Records

Produced by: Bram Tobey (mixed by), Nathan James (mastered by)

Moving even closer to Fahey territory with a restless but precise picking style, Alexander Turnquist’s Hallway Of Mirrors leans more fully into the maximalist side of his approach, with each track on the album providing quite the barrage: Turnquist may play like his genre inspirations, but his compositions have a punky urgency to them; and more grandiose / rock-like structures versus stemming from folksy ballads or Americana. At the same time, Mirrors isn’t as “noisy” as the preceding ‘As The Twilight Crane Dreams In Color‘, which had the same pace but was a lot of (in my likely-incorrect description of guitar) open chords, giving its songs a constant ringing out; this album – aligning with its title – is a bit more of a guided path, and constrained.

The bookends of Running Towards and Running From set a stage that’s ultimately a bit more delicate than the album’s contents – comparatively paced, repeated arpeggios (with, again, the caveat that I don’t really know what arpeggios are), though the way each track essentially unwind into more hurried and frantic playing is interesting, and kind of exposes my only issue with the album: its narrative. By giving us similarly named openers and closers, it makes me want to search for connective tissue, and string a story together; especially with the title, I expect / want some type of “reflection” between those tracks (and perhaps across the album’s structure), but it’s not really there. Running Towards and From repeat similar moves in the same sequence, albeit slightly different keys. ‘From’ is ultimately faster (and shorter), so maybe it’s an escape of sorts, but then the preceding ‘Waiting at the Departure Gate’ – which is a masterpiece of push and pull between violin and vibraphone-supported harried chord strums and slower, calm picked sections backed by ambience – doesn’t really align with the a character journey that ends in escape: it’s an ultimately thrilling and moving ending, not when you’re running “from.”

The title track and ‘Spherical Aberrations’ are “reflections” of each other, in that they’re rather similar, and do somewhat align with the two emotional states of ‘Departure,’ as Mirrors fast-paced plucking has slightly more ominous edgy undertones vs. ‘Spherical’s celebratory affectations, but… I dunno. I don’t know what the story is.

If you ignore all that and just focus on the music, I’m only left wanting slightly more of a divide between ‘Mirrors’ and ‘Aberrations;’ or maybe those could’ve been another single song like ‘Departure,’ just told in two parts. That aside, the album is very emotionally sweeping and bold, possessed of the same confidence as ‘Crane’ but without some of the inherent exhaustion that happens as that album plays out due to its always-on style; with ‘Hallway of Mirrors,’ Turnquist has found an amazing balance between delivering on that volume, but doling it out in a way that maintains its urgency but is also quite soothing at the same time.