Affirmation (with Discomfort)
Self-released |

On the back cover of their album A Night at the Opera, Queen famously declared “No synthesizers!” It’s an attempt to claim a certain kind of rock authenticity, to assert the power of the studio and the band’s own technical virtuosity. Similarly, saxophonist Colin Stetson often boasts about how his unrelenting performances contain no overdubs.

Matt Douglas‘s new solo album, Affirmation (with Discomfort) make a similar, somewhat more muted, claim, stating that all the sounds on it were made “using only woodwinds.” Douglas is probably best known for having played with a host of notable Triangle bands over the past decade, including with The Hot at Nights, Hiss Golden Messenger, The Rosebuds, Chris Stamey, Six String Drag, and The Mountain Goats. Cearly, he knows his way around woodwind instruments, and he puts that vast store knowledge to work for his first proper solo record, weaving together appealing textures and sinuous melodies from an ever-shifting array of instrumental colors and textures.

The album is a series of vignettes describing, as Douglas puts it, the “(imagined) seven emotional stages predecessing the consignment to marriage.” His vision of these emotional statesuncertainty and evaluation, affirmation and commitmentis imaginative, if a bit oblique. The journey through these emotions isn’t necessarily straightforward, and each is shot through with plenty of interesting ambiguity.

Take, for instance the opening track, “No. 1: Uncertainty,” which opens with a series of clipped, pulsing chords that sound like the ambient synths. The chords Douglas chooses seem half way between Bach and Philip Glass, lending the whole thing a tumbling, unsettled quality. When “normal” saxophones take over, the mood seems a little too joyous to be completely uncertain.

“No. 2: Caution” does feel more, well, cautious, even if it’s the record’s most sonically adventurous track, with saxes layered in such a way that they sound like distorted electric guitars. “No. 7: Threshold,” meanwhile, is perhaps the most unsettled of the set, replete with odd dissonances and strange effects in an otherwise stately chorale. But the wonderful, unexpected layerings of “No. 8: Committed” bring everything to an raucously understated close, proving just how much sound Douglas can wring out of his chosen instruments.