Mabe Fratti and Bill Orcutt’s collaboration didn’t begin colorfully or dramatically; Fratti just liked Orcutt and said so publicly, prompting Orcutt to reach out, which resulted in their working—remotely, mostly—on a series of pieces. Both are busy and prolific, which sometimes makes picking highlights in their discographies difficult, but Almost Waking registers as immediately special. Orcutt and Fratti understand each other, and their collaboration might be the most relaxed, generous music either has made.
If there is a loose theme to the eight pieces on Almost Waking, it might be “freedom of movement.” The dark clouds have dissipated from Orcutt’s guitar. Every sound he makes resounds with tightly bottled joy, like jubilant shouts shrunk down and transposed to octave riffs. Fratti matches him: The phrase she traces on the title track is a near-quote of George Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and it spreads like pleasurable heat prickling your neck.
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Almost Waking is a cat-in-the-sun record. On each piece, they indicate a wide-open space with some major chords and then stretch into all its corners without ever precisely moving. On “Forced & Forced & Forced,” or “Arise From Graves and Aspire,” Orcutt throws off a few different chord shapes, mimicking the sensation of running your hands under a fountain or stepping into shallow puddles, and Fratti does her best to match his tone. There isn’t a single hesitant or purposeless moment in the vibrantly colored messes they create together. Even though the pieces hover in place, they do so expectantly; like that sleeping cat, you grasp instinctively they could disappear in a streak out the window any second.
On several tracks, Fratti plugs in her cello and makes a startlingly convincing electric-guitar stunt double. During the most exciting passages, it becomes increasingly hard to locate the midpoint between the performers. As the two trade phrases, the waveforms blend and melt together, tugging at your ear playfully: Who is who?
Whether they mean to or not, there are times when they recreate the sound and feeling of ’90s Pacific Northwest indie rock. The “guitar” noises on “A Rural Pen” and “Forced,” whether Orcutt’s or Fratti’s, hover overhead, soft-edged and friendly. They could be Petri dishes for Built to Spill songs. At other times, Fratti turns her cello into a stand-up bass. On “Steps of the Sun,” her resonant plunking and Orcutt’s chiming summon other memories: Bert Jansch, maybe, or early Rod Stewart, or Fairport Convention. The landscape conjured in the mind’s-eye is the same: misty horizons, sheep-dotted landscapes.
But the most arresting moments on Almost Waking come when Fratti opens her mouth. On her own records, Fratti can sound like almost anything: desperate, lustful, angry, joyful, resigned. On Almost Waking, she appears as a soothsayer. She sings on two songs, and on both she sounds positively unearthly, maybe a faerie vision floating over that sheep-dotted hill. “El inicio es cuestion de suerte” is a loving exhortation to carry on in the face of uncertainty, while “Todo Puede Ser Error” muses gently on the nature of fate and existence. Behind her, Orcutt’s guitar spirals upward, lifting somewhere heavenward that neither of them have quite been to before.
