Album Review – Crackle / Hiss by Parker Longbough (2021) (Wilderhood Music)
This is the fifth album of Parker Longbough ( the solo project of Alaska’s Matthew Witthoeft)and can definitely be included in a whole plethora of brilliant releases, that the pandemic times have regurgitated after initially threatening to consume humanity.
Fuzzy, bedroom-pop at it’s core, Crackle/Hiss continues the Witthoeft‘s love affair with ‘that different whirr’. For track such as the brilliant opener Kirkland and Shit Leopard forego the general fuzz laws of allowing melodies to simper through the noise, in favour of an aesthetic that creates melodies out of a general mass of subtle distorted soundscapes. It’s is a sound so very hard to explain adequately, which is perhaps the main facet of it’s originality.
He could leave it there and fill the album with similar brilliance and no-ove would really have genuine cause to complain. However, Witthoeft has never imbued his back catalogue with any semblance of uniformity.
As such we see him subdue the tempo and drift the fuzz towards genuinely lucid lo-fi jangly melodies in Purdie Dumb, The Youngster and the title track and appease those who lust after the obtuse left field he always provides at some point within every release, in Selling Guitar Picks and Moose Bone.
Perhaps the best album so far from this project, among massively stiff competition.
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