Eric Silverman

If 2023’s Stay In It was Eric Silverman’s desert psychosis album, a hero’s journey through the heat and hallucinogenics threading from California to the cosmos, then Bitter Honey sets him up with the house band at the edge of the oasis. He’s camped out in quarters on the other side. Still reverberating with a kind of heat quiver caress, the new album is slicker in places, slipperier in others. It’s a pop chameleon that slips through the shade and shadow trying to keep out of that desert heat. The album takes its cues from Peter Gabriel and John Cale, skidding through the quicksilver edges of prog; the points where it melts into folk, pop, and rock. Silverman creates a glazed fusion that rides a gradient back and forth unable to become unstuck from its individual anchors. His assembled players add to the edge of the album, rankling with sax from Robby Elfman, pedal steel from Jake DeJongh, and the familiar wormhole synths from Adam MacDougal (Circles Around The Sun) that drove his previous album.

There’s still a bit of stressed sweat to the album, but at its core this is a more comfortable collection. It relaxes into the the contours of Silverman’s family life, revels in a new sense of serenity. Yet, the album retains an air of impossibility. The well of mystery is only deepened through stories of recording songs on Jerry Garcia’s old 8-track tape machine, of setting up in the belly of the old Record Plant. Swells of strings swaddle the songs in drama and dream. Soft steel cradles the album in sunset hues, but is the comfort real, is the oasis on solid ground, or is the album just a part of the haze and hallucination started in that desert a few years back? While the listener contemplates the concrete ideals of Bitter Honey, it’s just as well lean back into its layered embrace while we figure it out.

Support the artist. Buy it HERE.