Windy & Carl’s 2012 album We Will Always Be came with a caveat — a confessional blog post about marriage’s trials that, depending on your worldview, either upheld or undermined the work’s title.
With tracks as generous and genuine as what they ended up recording, songs like “Remember” or “Nature of Memory”, the couple proved that even after twenty years of making music together, they would always be. Nevertheless, a case could be made for doing things apart; though bassist/singer Windy Weber had put out a solo effort back in 2008, I Hate People, even then Carl Hultgren was given an engineering credit.
Now, the Dearborn-based duo’s guitarist has struck out on a solo debut LP whose limited run belies its big ideas. On Tomorrow, Carl Hultgren crafts a sonic landscape that is crystalline: it’s both precious and prescient, as if the music carries untold secrets in its seemingly transparent structure.
Despite the individual elements’ paper-thin weight, Hultgren amasses them in a way such that Tomorrow possesses more heft than anything in Windy & Carl’s repertoire. This vocal-less release possesses your spirit as well: the reverb-laden repetition of guitar patterns on songs like “In This Land” or “Found My Home” can easily lull a listener into a hypnotic state.
Yet what prompted the recording of Tomorrow was the very opposite of stasis, as the couple moved to a new neighborhood shortly before the making of the album. In Hultgren’s own words, “A change of scenery can change a person.” Relocation may have lightened up Hultgren’s sound, but it hasn’t stripped him of his penchant for reverie, which shows up both in dreamlike melodies and the subtle clang of intertwining, down-tuned guitar motifs that borrow equally from space rock, dream pop, and ambient music.
Furthermore, on Tomorrow Hultgren steps away from his role as one half of a duo and begins to fully explore the expressive range of his instrument – from back porch twang to experimentation with sound sculpting and minimalism, impulses he may have held in check on Windy & Carl productions.
Moving, both physically and musically, has given Hultgren the license to break the mold he’d formed during his prolific career with his wife. At the very least, when he’s not defying expectations, Hultgren’s focused on showing off new tricks, which makes Tomorrow an altogether welcome addendum to the world of Windy & Carl.
The digital-only release of Tomorrow comes with six additional bonus songs, bringing the total running time of the album to just under two hours long, but if there were ever a record that warranted more – rather than less – this could be it. Though Carl Hultgren gives us enough on the main attraction, there remains a sense of something missing. Even when his carefully built up walls of sound threaten to overwhelm, a feeling of mystery pervades the atmosphere. Perhaps we’ll get the answer to what that is on future releases.
Until then, we’ll always have Tomorrow.
Listen to Carl Hultgren’s Tomorrow below: