Archibald, Alex: Waste Knot LP

I first heard Alex Archibald's music on the 2018 compilation Tenderly Industrial, a coming together of Vancouver guitarists all loosely working in the 'American Primitive' tradition. That term, originally coined by John Fahey in a moment of self-deprecating humor, and endlessly fussed over by guitarists and listeners ever since, is like all genre terms, a necessary evil. But beyond the obvious signposts (blues based finger picking, non-standard tunings, etc) the term suggests to me a philosophical approach: honest, direct, unadorned. Like his Vancouver peers Lorna Rowe and Spencer Davis, Alex's pieces on the comp were simple in their lack of gratuitous overplaying, but complex in their intricacy and inventiveness, and I made a mental note to pick up his forthcoming solo album (2019's Cat Got Tongue).

That album, and its follow up Woodbug, strike me as being two of the best solo guitar records to ever come out of Vancouver. Cat Got Tongue was the more restless of the two; the sound of someone with a lifetime of ideas releasing them all at once in an ecstasy of artistic abandon, but it was the slower and more spacious Woodbug that stayed with me longer. When I bumped into Alex at a show a few months later, I was struck by how closely his demeanour mirrored his music; emotionally reserved but disarmingly genuine, clever in his turns of phrase, and above all, deeply fascinated by the minutia of daily life. In this sense, his work is not all that different from the sketchbook observations of cartoonist R. Crumb or the early snapshots of photographer Stephen Shore.