The duo of Charles Wyatt and Jared Matt Greenberg, working under the name of Charles Atlas, have been creating quiet introspective music for ten years now that even in its own tight orbit manages to sparkle and shine with a magical vibrant urgency, and unapologetically exists in a time and place all of its own, without reference it seems to the rest of the world. Social Studies is an 11 track primer to their recorded work over that time span, showcasing the delicately brittle emotional introversion that characterises their music of crystal clarity and diamantine dazzle.
Here are sound-paintings of a mythical, lost America almost, an America portrayed by literature, cinema, and the popular imagination. Guided by glassine guitar and shivering keys aided by mournful strings, soulful brass, and assorted other instruments, Charles Atlas pull us into their world of multifarious moods, of pained romanticism and muted colors, of driving on lonely stretches of desert highway bisecting washed out empty landscapes, of nights spent alone in isolated hotels and drinking in smoky midnight bars, and of endlessly sunny days. These are compositions of ordinary lives lived in small ways, of insignificant but meaningful moments celebrated, of tragedies and triumphs marked—all the tiny moments of life that somehow get swamped by the bigger events but are just as important in sculpting the shape of a person’s journey from birth to death. It is these intimacies of unknown lives and people (but which yet echo our own) that Charles Atlas highlights, shining a torch on sorrows and happinesses alike, bringing the small details into razor sharp relief.
The songs, like most lives in this imagined reflection of the real world, slowly unfold, taking time to reveal their stories and narratives, coaxing shyness and reticence out of their protective shells and giving them their moment in the sun. Shimmering electric piano on opener “Chapultepec” for instance intertwines with strummed acoustic guitar and a subtle latin beat, an exotic little number that breathes a superficially sunny disposition but which hides a melancholia which seeps through in the subtlest of ways. “The Snow Before Us” is perhaps my favorite track on here: mandolin delightfully weaving in and out of strummed and plucked acoustic guitar; the instruments seeming to swoop around and chase each other like two swallows cavorting in the air. This is probably one of the brightest compositions on here, broadcasting a quiet unspoken confidence that all is well with the world. Contrastingly, along comes a track like “The Deadest Bar,” a startlingly beautiful slow-burning 12 minute long drone and guitar track that successfully evokes a lonely 3 in the morning vibe, where the only customers in the bar are the loners and drifters, the itinerants, and the haggard worn-out whores who are desperately still trying to turn a trick, but only managing to drink themselves into a running-mascara stupor instead. Similarly, “Neither/Nor” carries a melodica and string-fuelled downbeat melancholic feel to it, a perfect evocation of sitting on a bed in some godforsaken bedside lamp-lit roadside motel room, a short rest-stop while running away on the road between somewhere and nowhere.
It’s good to know that people are still wrenching affecting emotion and atmospheres from traditional instruments like strings, horns, melodicas, pianos, and guitars, and that there is still a place for craft and musicianship. Make no mistake about it, each of the 11 pieces proffered to us here have been carefully crafted and constructed, and given due consideration as to how best to illuminate each story and tale being told. The overall effect is to bestow a spotlight on the unremarkable minutiae of the everyday and elevate it into something entirely special and enlightening. That, to me, is what epitomises the music of Charles Atlas.
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