A Song For Friday: Richard Aufrichtig
Blissful and expansive music from a great singer-songwriter. Also: WPTR, Triptides, Dominique And The Diamonds, and Resavoir & Matt Gold.
I’ve probably written and talked many times about how I met Richard Aufrichtig during my first week at the New York Genome Center, where we were colleagues. Thanks to a company-wide email, I quickly discovered he was a brilliant singer and songwriter. Consider that I started at NYGC in April 2016, and by June, I had already seen Richard’s band, Ocean Music, in concert and included a review of an EP in my first record roundup. Over the last near-decade, I’ve continued to trumpet Richard’s work, including his 2019 album, Troubadour No. 1, which was my number one album that year and landed on my list of the 100 best albums of the 2010s, where I called it a “transcendent collection of chamber-folk-art-dance-rock.”
Since that album, Richard has released the excellent Perfume Cigarettes, also created with Josh Kaufman, which I praised for its “spare arrangements that mesmerize on their own while highlighting Aufrichtig's warm, wise vocals.” We were also gifted the intriguing Morsels, a collaboration with Jerome Ellis, a covers EP, and the astonishing One More Cup EP, which put a Bob Dylan classic in new electronic contexts. 2024 brought a band project, Big Numbers, a trio that featured Richard’s songwriting, vocals, and bass playing, and hit my Top 25.
That’s just a partial roadmap to new territory for Richard’s music, which launches today with the release of Everybody On The Breeze. This four-song EP features him performing all the primary instruments (vocals, guitar, bass, and drums) himself. His only collaborator is Ben Lanz, known for his work with Sufjan Stevens, The National, Beirut, and others, who contributes horns, guitar, piano, and percussion. Richard’s production and engineering shine throughout, with every instrument given its own space and weight while still cohering into a unified sound. His playing is also distinctive, with ear-catching finger drags on bass, creative drum patterns (and a mean cowbell), and guitars that interlock or soar as the moment demands.
The third track, The Gift, is a perfect example, boasting an ever-ascending series of riffs anchored by a muscular fuzz bass and driven forward by a rattling drum part that sounds like a one-man marching band. Richard’s vocals have the confidence and joy of someone who has found the answers, or at least an answer. The glee is amplified by a guitar solo made of long, bent notes that ends in a touch of noise. Check it out.
The EP also includes instrumental versions of the tracks allowing you appreciate the many subtle delights of the music, or just vibe out to it. Richard, who is also a DJ, also suggests it could work as background music for your radio show.
The lyrics are of a piece with Richard’s earlier work, poetic yet plainspoken, revealing yet universal. The second verse of The Gift especially hits me where I live.
Every day I wake up in the morning
Singin’ out the sound of hope
A romantic, out of time, and candid
I can only tell you what I know
That I’d like to be
I’d like to be
I’d like the gift of getting old
I can only tell you what I know: Richard is a fantastic singer, songwriter, and musician, whose music nourishes and uplifts while not shying away from the complexities of being alive. When I included Troubadour No. 1 in my top 100 albums of the 2010s, I called it “heart music” - and we can all use more of that can’t we?
P.S. Richard is also working on his first-ever solo tour! Keep an eye out for dates near you in August.
Listen to most of the songs for Friday here or below.
Also Out This Week
WPTR - Redness And Swelling At The Injection Site Don’t touch your dial; you’ve tuned into WPTR, Peter Gill radio, featuring the best in power pop, fractured folk, and bossa nova. Between Gill’s work in 2nd Grade, who put out the excellent Scheduled Explosions last year, and Friendship, whose Caveman Wakes Up is one of this year’s delights, it’s a wonder he found time to deliver his first solo album. Amidst tuneful gems like Glad To Be Sad are many tracks that pursue a personal take on the cerebral, wordy side of bossa nova like a low-fi Father John Misty. Gill’s fuzzy guitar and hushed, conversational voice keep things intimate, even when the songs get slightly abstract. It all adds up to a captivating portrait of the artist as a restless man and, unlike my recent pneumonia vaccine, I guarantee no pain at the injection site!
Triptides - Shapeshifter I seem to have missed a couple of albums by this most elegant of psych-rock bands since I highlighted 2021’s Alter Echoes for its “Lysergic, sun-drenched rock.” The only constant in Triptides has been multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter Glenn Brigman who performed, produced, and mixed Shapeshifter largely on his own. The resulting tracks are sleeker and more propulsive and feel a little weightier, too, without ever getting particularly heavy. Call it summer-psyche, if you will, and you’ll find that its right on time.
Dominique And The Diamonds - s/t Dominique Gomez has both Minnesota farmland and rural Colombia in her background. However, her swinging take on country music is almost pure California, i.e., Bakersfield and Gram Parsons. This project came into focus after meeting Triptides’ Glenn Brigman (see above), who lends a crystal clarity that lets the songs and Gomez’s rich voice shine, along with the excellent band, especially the pedal steel of Tyler English. Brigman also contributes keyboards while Hamilton Boyce and Craig Jacobs keep things moving on bass and drums, respectively. If what passes for country on the radio these days turns you off, tune into Dominique And The Diamonds for the antidote.
Resavoir & Matt Gold - Horizon The 2019 debut of Will Miller’s Resavoir hit my project with its “organic soundscapes” which shaded into realms of ambient jazz. A second self-titled album in 2023 kept the mellow party going with tracks that were “Smooth, melodic, groovy as heck.” Now, we have this collaborative release, with Miller co-leading the affair with Gold, who contributes mostly guitar, bass, and drums. The results are quite sublime, with the expansive flavor of an orchestral bossa nova album. This means when Mei Semones shows up on a track (along with Claudius Agrippa and Noah Leong, who play violin and viola on Semones’ wonderful Animaru), it’s as if nature intended it. But that’s the Resavoir way, giving the perfect illusion of going with the flow while planning and executing everything to perfection.
The graphic above is based on a photo by Corey King.