Looking at the album art for Car Culture’s sophomore album, Rest Here, you see a man dressed in jeans and a pressed shirt beneath a full suit of armor, looking sullied and unenthusiastic in an ordinary-looking American parking lot. He seems ironically unimpressive among his surroundings, in an ostensibly cheap suit, yet romantically and hopefully armored against the boring futility of average life. I don’t think the cover could be more perfect; this is exactly what the album feels like: displaced, surreal, and grazing on influences from the very ordinary.
Released on NAFF Recordings, Daniel Fisher’s second album as Car Culture (a break from his Physical Therapy moniker) includes tracks featuring collaborations with Squirrel Flower, Ms Ray, Patrick Holland and Priori. Constructed over the course of three years between New York and Montreal, the ambience of the album as a whole is sparkling, otherworldly, and ethereal. Building on elements of retrofuturism and 80s synthwave ambient textures, the outcome feels like watching a video-game playthrough in the backrooms. Immersed in something technical and glitching, the sonics are redolent of internet and video-game visuals circa 2000.
The experience of listening to the album feels like those moments when you’re a little kid, riding in the backseat at night on a long drive, the moon following your car while you watch her, music playing on the stereo, people talking. Everything is a contemplative, cosy, safe place. It feels like getting lost on purpose.
New Jersey native Fisher opens the album with “Rockland County”. For an album so heavily laced with an almost aggressive nostalgia, it feels pointed that the first track be riddled with so many “I remember”s; It’s playful, like a lullaby or bedtime story, opening the album into a medieval fairytale.
The next track is the single “Nothingburger”, a title that also feels connected to the album art in its ordinary yet distinctly American nature. The extended note in the background sounds like a flashlight down a long corridor that continues the sentence of remembering, and the twinkling guitar that plays along with it is both melancholic and tender, like a soft wind howling in an empty forest.
“The Commitment Issue” progresses the album with haunting chants of “endless change”. Reminiscient of something off a Chelsea Wolfe album, it conjures images of a foggy dreamscape, occupying a landscape similar to that of Wuthering Heights.
“Fizzle” sounds like a soundtrack of being lost in space, of losing connection, and drifting away. This track leaves you among the stars and the planets before bleeding into the next one.
The breakdown in “Screen Time” is elated and seductive. The buildup feels like falling down a rabbit hole, everything is chaos and spinning all around you, and yet you maintain an invincible feeling of peace. It’s dizzying, like a 90s movie with those strange, distorted fisheye-lens shots, or a scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It’s lost time, it’s letting go.
Rest Here is the kind of album you have to listen to in full every time. It reminds me a bit of the album 2012-2017 by Against All Logic; a heavily sampled electronic masterpiece that took five years to create. Each song has unique experimental accomplishments that cohere successfully, borrowing from shared elements like matching colour schemes. It’s full of great breakdowns and landscapes to get lost in, and feels like the musical equivalent of a sensory deprivation tank, or a lazy river in a backroom; something temperate, playful, sedating. All at once a bit unsettling but familiar and harmless.
Tender and captivating, Rest Here accomplishes a feeling of blasé self-destruction and exploration, as if the persistence of softly acknowledging a hurt and remembering the pain will heal something. An unspooling of nostalgia right from the beginning, Rest Here feels like a reconciliation with change, with growing up; what we expect the world to be, and what it becomes.
