ARCHER PREWITT
Three
Thrill Jockey
· Step into the time machine.
Archer Prewitt’s records have always stuck out as having a skewed sense of time and place – in the ’90s, while the world was busy mocking itself with flannel and distortion, Prewitt sat at home amalgamating his high school jazz lessons with ’70s bubblegum pop for both the Coctails and the Sea and Cake.
With Three, he steps out for solo album numero trois (what’s wrong with being literal-minded?), Prewitt has jumped backwards with both feet laced up in vintage Chuck Taylors. Layering his deceptively simple tunes with mounds of orchestration and effects (give the man 64 tracks and he’ll fill every one), our pal Archer could trick just about anyone into thinking he was huge three decades ago. But forget about your parents’ nightclub excesses (a.k.a. those chunks of their early 20s they don’t seem to recall), on Three it’s all about the music – rock and roll for chin-stroking musos with underground comic collections and alphabetically arranged record racks. As he puts it succinctly in "When I’m With You," Archer’s "just fine with an ordinary kind of day" – and Three is a perfect soundtrack for precisely that.
For those of us who missed it the first time around, it’s 1973 all over again.
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