Overview

On the debut solo album of WPTR aka Peter Gill (2nd Grade, Friendship, Hour), the pastoral four-track arcana of Bill Fox meets the harmonically restless jazz-pop refractions of Chris Weisman and Antonio Carlos Jobim. The feeling is introverted, casually moody, elegiac in an offbeat way, and altogether more John than Paul. The songs are populated by chess grandmasters, Italian filmmakers, abstract sculptors, wartime writers, and celebrity superstars wandering around like ghosts in the wrong century. Dense clusters of jazz chords accumulate into strange bossa nova structures with no clear center of gravity, before giving way to the warmth and tenderness of simple folk songs. Blunders and accidental noises abound; at one point the unplanned flushing of a toilet is transfigured as a soothing tropical rainstorm. These messes are nevertheless contained by a beguiling architecture; consider “New Old Look”, which finds Charles Ives’s “Unanswered Question” superimposed over “The Girl From Ipanema” changes as Gill muses in a chipmunk voice about the expansion of the universe. The broadcast radius of WPTR is buzzing with confusion and contradiction, yet is bound by the basic promise that “one is one and one & one makes two / over & over when it comes to you.”