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Reviews

Dave Halverson — Shapelifter
((Not on label) no#, 2019, DL)

by Jon Davis, Published 2020-11-06

Shapelifter Cover art

I first encountered guitarist Dave Halverson with his band Trance Lucid back in 2013. On Shapelifter, he’s on his own with an eccentric set of instrumental tunes presenting vignettes utilizing various instruments, most of them fairly brief, and many featuring only a few different instruments. “Lurch’s Harpsichord” is a bouncy synthesizer outing; “That Sinking Feeling I” and a few others set an electric guitar over long keyboard washes; “Metafizz” has splashy chords punctuating phrases from acoustic guitar; “Mourning Doves” is a pedal steel solo; “Subroutine” has a random-sounding piano, an acoustic bass sample, and some odd synth chords. Other tunes are more fleshed out, like “Put Your Trust in Fairy Dust,” which has multiple guitar parts, bass, keys, and drums, along with a slew of sampled voices. “India” is backed, oddly enough, by a distant-sounding sample of bagpipes, adding guitars, drums, keys and more into a slowly-building wall of sound. On the whole, Shapelifter is an enjoyable journey that shows an artist having fun exercising his creativity. Where human playing rather than programming is the focus of a track, it’s always some kind of guitar in the spotlight, and Halverson is up to the task with his tasty playing.

Filed under: New releases, 2019 releases

Related artist(s): Dave Halverson

 

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