“Do you remember?” are the first words of Fred Thomas Window on the rhythm—and the subject for each verse that follows. Can you recall every sound, sight and smell from a 2002 DIY show, but not where you left your keys five minutes ago? Have you ever looked for your crappy student rental on Google Street View? If so, you have a potential Fred Thomas song in you. Though Thomas usually juggles three different projects at any given time, he's an Ann Arbor Proust on his solo records, trading a madeleine for the darkest slice of Backroom pizza. But his daydreams are no longer content to accept nostalgia only as an end game. On Window on the rhythmThomas dares to ask Why you remember
The album is an unexpected coda to indie-lifer Thomas' trilogy that seemingly ended with 2018 After. These albums combined mixtapes, twee-pop collages, folk-punk, Elephant 6 fan-fic and abstract electronica to better represent his full range of interests. (One such mix appears on the opener “Embankment,” where he sings, “I made you a tape of the same Squarepusher song four times, but not in a row/To mimic the way so much was random/The abundance of magic in a fragmented flow .”) This time, Thomas drops Joanna Newsom’s name Yes as a primary influence. His story is heard: There's harp in the credits (by Mary Lattimore and Shelley Burgon) and the average song length is eight and a half minutes. But the core elements of Thomas' robust songwriting haven't changed. wordy, sung lyrics just follow the scenic route before jerking upright into tightly wound Motown-inspired harmonies.
Thomas's memory goes beyond “photographic” or even “cinematic”. But his most evocative writing creates a sensual feast – “the dull, water-colored glow of every Adderall halo.” “Stale gray water in a jar”; “an ugly, unwashed tie shirt”; “Mattresses in the basement/Black sheets hung in place of doors.” In any of these images, the taste of stale Pabst comes back so strongly, I felt the urge to pop three sticks of peppermint gum.
Like any quest for lost time, it's all inherently self-indulgent, and while even casual lurkers might catch the references to Lovesick's early emo outfit, the lyric sheet should probably have been annotated. Yet not a second feels wasted, not even when the whole point is to represent the amorphous expanses of a 20s that take shape only in hindsight: eternal Novembers and rusty spring bikes, days organized around frivolous parties and dead-end jobs. Oversized closer “Wasn't” is half a feedback drone, but even that decision supports Thomas' mixtape mentality by pushing Window on the rhythm in exactly one hour. “Coughed Up a Cufflink” is utterly effective, condensing the silence of a day's drive through the Midwest into 10 mesmerizingly tense minutes. Midway through, a brief glimpse from the past expands into a full-blown melodrama:
