San Francisco's most cultish return to the vinyl format with this 2024 edition of a tape they first issued via Nick Umbrellas' Discontinuous Innovation label almost a year ago to the day. Mysterious enough as is, here Peter Hurley and co. dial up the intrigue a notch or two further with nine vaporous shimmers of dreamstate rapture that lean heavily into their opaque world of mythical characters (here the titular Wesley, Johnny; previously Shirley, Christopher, Tiffany...) and tape hiss romanticism. The DNA is easy enough to read - Recurring-period Spacemen 3, MBV, Opal, Secret Shine, Blueboy and so forth - and yet there's some magic in the aggregation of those trace elements that can't be qualified by a mere joining of dots. More than the sum of their parts? Yes, but isn't that what the good art is anyway? No surprise to learn that Hurley is a wonderful painter, also, the soft-edged cubist quality of his canvases a perfect reflection of songwriting and recording style, which feels both abstract and distinct: you can make out the form well enough, but the meaning not so sharply defined. And as such, the true value resides in the foggy haze of feeling that blooms around it. Surely soon to be heralded as one of the best out there doing it right now.
