Australian-born bassist and composer Anna Butterss releases Mighty Vertebrate, their debut album for International Anthem, alongside focus track “Dance Steve (feat. Jeff Parker),” available across streaming platforms.
“Dance Steve” highlights Mighty Vertebrate’s bold crossover moments with a slow roiling post-punk panic. Overlapping samples expand and contract to start the track off, followed by a lo-fi bedroom beat that gives way to crunchy guitar riffs, boom bap 808 rhythms, dizzy synth repetitions, and dense layers of percussion. After a moment of ambient-trance, Jeff Parker enters on electric guitar and lays down a signature solo as Butterss steers the ship with a dubby bass groove threaded between the beats.
As evidenced by Butterss’ remarkably varied CV — one that veers from the krautrock-steeped fusion of emergent Los Angeles supergroup SML and improvisatory jazz workouts alongside Makaya McCraven to the skyward indie of Phoebe Bridgers and the anthemic Americana of Jason Isbell, among so much more — their versatility as a collaborator is head-spinning. But that busy schedule can be both a blessing and something of an obstacle.
Mighty Vertebrate — Butterss’ first solo album since Activities, which Pitchfork hailed as “one of the most exciting, undersung jazz releases of 2022″ — began amid the very real challenge of threading solo work into the dense calendrical web of an in-demand collaborator.
“I had just gotten off of a bunch of touring at the end of 2022 and just wanted to write music,” says Butterss. “The best way for me to do that, I’ve found, is to set myself a discrete and focused task.” The prompts read like something out of an Oblique Strategies deck:
I’m going to make a song where the bass doesn’t function in the role of a bass.
I’m going to work on this for an hour and then I’m going to stop.
I’m going to make a song that uses groups of three-bar phrasing.
I want to sample something and make it into a song.
I’m going to start with a drum machine.
“Every song was like that,” Butterss continues. “Then once I got started I just followed where my mind wanted to go. It was very structured.”
The music — and even the album artwork, created by Tortoise member and one of Butterss’ many sonic reference points John Herndon — reflects that structure beautifully. Butterss’ material was tightly composed and melodically realized before being decked out with candied, kaleidoscopic soundscapes courtesy of album co-producer and percussionist, Ben Lumsdaine. Butterss and Lumsdaine eventually migrated the operation to Chris Schlarb’s Long Beach hideaway BIG EGO to track a selection of full band material with trusted longtime collaborators (and Butterss’ bandmates in SML) Gregory Uhlmann (guitar) and Josh Johnson (saxophone).
This band imbues Mighty Vertebrate with the same confident, chameleonic command that Butterss exhibits across their varied projects. Vintage afrobeat grooves provide ballast for post-modern pedalboard tone sculptures (“Bishop”); Malian desert guitar licks are imbued with a slow roiling post-punk panic (on the Jeff Parker-featuring “Dance Steve”); and placid saxophone elegies are refracted through bubbling synthesis (“Ella”). There are nods towards City Pop, 8-bit video game soundtracks, foreboding post-rock, and lo-fi hip-hop drum machines — all elegantly assembled into a seamless, ever-shifting whole.
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