A Song For Friday: Spencer Hoffman

Cherry Picker is full of heart and craft. Also: The Orielles, Claire Dickson, Shutterspeed Duo, Meredith Bates, Laurel Halo, Weston Olencki, Delphine Dora, Tinariwen, and ELUCID & Sebb Bash.

The language of recorded music, with its layers and little touches, only seems inevitable when it all fits together and resonates with that map of sounds we all assemble over a lifetime of listening. Even complete left turns, and production choices so wrong that they’re right, can hit you right where you live when the stars align. But Cherry Picker, Spencer Hoffman’s second album, out today on Anxiety Blanket, is not one of those records. It’s the other kind, where everything sounds so right that it feels fresh and new while instantly becoming an old friend.

That’s not to say that Hoffman and his co-Producer Sam Plecker took the easy way out. After all, the subject of the album is nothing less than the dissolution of a long-term relationship. Each of the nine songs is treated with the care demanded by the emotions they encompass, with detailed arrangements, expert playing, sweet singing, and a warm, balanced production. The leap from 2022’s Apple Core is quite profound, with a sense of quiet confidence replacing the tentative quality I heard there.

Fiddler’s Green is a perfect example of Hoffman and Plecker’s craft. Beginning with a momentary studio wobble and acoustic guitar that alternates between finger-picking and sharp strums that follow the vocal melody, the song soon picks up a steady rhythm. Listening into the mix doesn’t make clear what’s producing that rhythm—a drum, another guitar, a wooden crate?—but your toes will tap nonetheless. After a few turns through the opening structure, the bridge slows things down, becoming almost psychedelic. XTC at their most pastoral comes to mind, but soon there’s a suave trumpet, maybe a flute or two, all this wind, brass, and wood creating pillowy textures. Picking up all this baggage only makes the song fly higher.

The lyrics in the middle of Fiddler’s Green reveal the problem Hoffman is trying to solve with all this wonderful froth.

As the seed that’s been planted
Aches for morning dew
I took you for granted
And left you feeling blue

The album’s title could reflect Hoffman’s engagement with the fruit and flowers of the natural world, or for his ability to take inspiration from music legends of the past (McCartney, Nilsson) and the present (Fleet Foxes) without losing the distinct qualities of his melodic and musical choices. It took him three years to make Cherry Picker and the resulting riches, full of heart and craft, prove that was time well spent.

Listen to all the songs for Friday here or below.

Other Recent Releases

The Orielles - Only You Left (Heavenly) Four years after the art-rock excursion of Tableau, their third album, this Manchester-based trio deftly converts all they learned along the way into 11 concise songs that somehow manage to be tightly wound and spacious. Bassist Esmé Hand-Halford’s airy vocals have a lot to do with that, providing counterpoint to Henry Wade’s guitar, which ranges from dry to cutting, while Sidonie Hand-Halford’s drums move things along with clean, cool-headed patterns. I hadn’t realized how much time had passed since Tableau, so the return of The Orielle’s is a welcome surprise.

Claire Dickson - Balance (New Amsterdam) Even though I featured Dickson’s beautiful The Beholder on my podcast in March 2024, it’s very genre-fluidity means that it slipped through the cracks of my written pieces. It surely deserved a spot in either the Electronic or Rock, Folk, Etc. entries in my Best Of 2024 series. Well, I have a few months now to figure out where this new collection will fit in. While still filled with plenty of electronic textures, there are also more clearly defined rhythms and song structures, putting Dickson at the center of a spectrum ranging from Billie Eilish to Björk. That’s a fine place to be indeed and leads to a transporting listen.

Shutterspeed Duo - All-American Futurity Trials (New Focus) Once someone has convinced you to take a canoe ride in the Gowanus canal—not once, but three times—you’ll pretty much follow them anywhere. So it is with Ford Fourqurean, who, among other things, plays clarinet in Unheard-of//Ensemble, the band that worked with Christopher Stark to bring Fire Ecologies to life, on water and in the studio. Also a composer, here he collaborates with Erich Barganier, a guitarist and composer whom I’ve kept an eye on at least since 2019, when I fell for the “strangled stridulations” of his piece The Veneer Melts.

The two of them, each adding a healthy dose of electronics to their chosen instruments, have created a glorious storm of an album. Ropes opens the album with a clarion call that will electrify listeners of all genres. From there, they burrow deeper into the many dimensions of their craft, with near ambient sections colliding with doom-laden soundscapes. Recorded by Michael Hammond and Bill Brittelle, who have worked similar magic with Molly Joyce, and mixed by Scott Hirsch, known for his playing, writing, and production with Hiss Golden Messenger and his own excellent albums, All-American Futurity Trials is thoroughly ready for prime time. Give it some of yours.

Meredith Bates - The Observer Effect (Books 1 & 2) (Phonometrograph) When you’ve already called someone a visionary, what’s left to say when they drop your jaw yet again? Bates, a Vancouver-based violinist, composer, and producer, stunned many with the towering and “occasionally overwhelming” Tesseract in 2023. Now she has gifted us with two hours and 19 minutes of magma-deep pieces that take tonal and textural explorations to new realms. Shaping her viola, violin, electronics, and field recordings into endless pools of sound, some tracks also include electronics by Scott Morgan (AKA loscil) and synth by Chris Gestrin. And, on Book II - Third Incantation (binding), percussionist Curtis Andrews makes a startling appearance, ending the album in a celebratory manner, like a post-punk dance party in a pitch-black forest. Bates seems equally tapped into both the ritualistic and analytical sides of the brain, making for a richly satisfying listening experience that never quite solves its own mystery.

Laurel Halo - Midnight Zone (Awe) This soundtrack to a film about a Lighthouse lens drifting to the bottom of one of the deepest places on earth makes a nice companion piece to Žibuokle Martinaitytė’s “immersive” Hadal Zone from 2023. Halo builds layers of electronics using sounds drawn from a Yamaha TransAcoustic piano, violin, and viol da gamba, blending sounds ancient and modern to describe a place untouched by time or light.

Delphine Dora - L’ineluctable pulsation de temps (Marionette) Recommended for your Monday morning soundtrack, as Dora uses the Nord Electro to explore the possibilities of repetition with a variety of glassy textures.

Resavoir - Themes For Dreams (L’Univers) On Horizon, last year’s “expansive” collaboration with Matt Gold, Will Miller’s jazz-adjacent project picked up where it left off with its swaggering take on Alex North’s Love Theme From Spartacus, delivering an album of sweet licks and funky rhythms. This time around, Miller has concocted a series of whimsical sonic postcards, with his questing keyboards setting the path for collaborators including Macie Stewart (violin), Gold (pedal steel), and William Corduroy (guitar). Lloyd Billingham gets a lovely solo spot for guitar and, instead of covering North, Miller incorporates J.S. Bach’s first Cello Sonata into the penultimate track, Life Goes On, adding swooping new counterpoint to the familiar melody. If you do use these themes for your dreams, I suspect they will be good ones.

Weston Olencki - Two Postscripts (Outside Time) Somehow, Olencki has turned “scraps” from Broadsides, the 2025 album that I called a “triumph,” into something equally rich. Consisting of two 30-minute tracks, one for autoharp and the other for banjo, the album luxuriates in textures and tones that develop into narratives of sound. Following the threads seems easy at first, but they only grow more tangled. Like a late episode of Twin Peaks: The Return, it may just be better to let Olencki’s mastery happen to you instead of trying to understand it.

Tinariwen - Hoggar (Wedge) The legendary Tuareg band returns with their tenth album, a rich tapestry of acoustic guitars and earthy vocals that shifts from their trademark desert blues to something deeper in their heritage. Guest spots from José González, a Swedish singer with Argentine roots, and Solafa Elyas, from Sudan, put inter- and intra-continental connections on display without diluting the elemental power of what is by now a band of brothers.

ELUCID and Sebb Bash - I Guess U Had To Be There (Backwoodz) Spare yet dimensional, gritty and futuristic, the beats of Swiss producer Bash provide a bespoke backdrop for some of ELUCID’s toughest rhyming on his first album since 2024. At times his flow is robotic, at others he chews the mic like Ghostface Killah, in every mode turning out combinations of words that catch the ear and set the mind to wondering.

Note: The graphic above is based on a photo by Natalie Chahal, AKA Miss World.