ANNA BUTTERSS – Mighty Vertebrate – LP – ‘Fossilized Chartreuse’ Green Coloured Vinyl [OCT 4]

LP – Limited Edition140g “Fossilized Chartreuse” Colour Vinyl inside a heavyweight reverse-board jacket, with IARC OBI strip and poly-lined dome patterned innersleeve. Pressed at Pallas in Germany with lacquers cut by Daniel K at SST.

‘Mighty Vertebrate‘ is the International Anthem leader debut from Adelaide, Australia-born bassist and composer Anna Butterss.

Butterss has steadily become a first-call for tour and studio work since moving to Los Angeles (after a stint in Bloomington, Indiana) in 2014. Theyve racked up credits with notables across the indie, jazz, and pop worlds alike including Makaya McCraven, Phoebe Bridgers, Jason Isbell, Andrew Bird, and Daniel Villarreal but their most notable contributions to the burgeoning West Coast creative music scene have been as a core member of both Jeff Parkers ETA IVtet and rising proto-trance supergroup SML, who Pitchfork says represents the thrilling next phase of a vibrant L.A. community.

Their first solo album, ‘Activities‘, was similarly hailed by Pitchfork as “one of the most exciting, undersung jazz releases of 2022,” but the improvise-edit-reconstruct method used on that record couldnt be further from the foundation of ‘Mighty Vertebrate‘, which 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, Ive found, is to set myself a discrete and focused task.”

– Im going to make a song where the bass doesnt function in the role of a bass.
– Im going to work on this for an hour and then Im going to stop.
– Im going to make a song that uses groups of three-bar phrasing.
– I want to sample something and make it into a song.
– Im going to start with a drum machine.

Every song was like that, they continue. Then once I got started I just followed where my mind wanted to go. It was very structured.

The music itself reflects that structure beautifully, with the material being tightly composed and melodically realized by Butterss well in advance of production concerns. They eventually migrated the operation to Chris Schlarbs Long Beach hideaway BIG EGO to track a selection of full band material. With Schlarb at the controls they reconvene a group of trusted longtime collaborators to bring their compositions to fruition: Josh Johnson (sax), Gregory Uhlmann (guitar), and Ben Lumsdaine (drums, guitar, production).

I am definitely hearing this group when Im writing the music or thinking of how its going to be played live, Butterss notes. Im hearing these specific people. Theyre going to understand what this is supposed to feel like. Were not going to have to talk about it much. Its just going to feel very natural, which it was.

The results speak to the natural quality of those interactions, and their breadth and scope might have been difficult to achieve otherwise. From the Robbie-Shakespeare-in-groove-mode intro to the album opener Bishop to the spacious cinematic doom of Seeing You, there is a lot to wrangle into one cohesive concept. Its the bedrock of the lineup which keeps the circle unbroken. Butterss deep rooted musical relationship with the albums co-producer, multi-instrumentalist and IARC labelmate Ben Lumsdaine, is also an undeniable factor in the cohesion. The duo have played together since meeting as teens in music school, and worked closely with one another on every aspect of the ten tracks that make up ‘Mighty Vertebrate‘. That comfort level extends the confident and natural feeling of the sessions to post production, granting the internal arc of each piece the same tidy-yet-adventurous quality found in the compositions themselves.

For instance, Dance Steve opens with overlapping samples expanding, contracting, and quickly focusing into a rhythm blended with a lo-fi bedroom beat just before the sonic scope is widened with a tuff-and-crunchy guitar riff over a straight boom bap 808 rhythm. Synth repetitions chirp dizzily while chorused guitars soften the scene and the subtly dense percussive layers build and unbuild. The songs halfway mark finds the listener cooling down as the melodies retreat and the rhythm settles into ambient-trance mode. Its only a chance to catch a breath, it turns out, as the last third of the track is the big reveal. Enter Jeff Parker (the albums lone featured guest) on electric guitar along with Lumsdaine in a deep-pocket tambourine-accompanied groove. All synths, samples, and guitars have brightened and been rendered percussive a web of tiny pulsing rhythms and Parker uses the moment to lay down a classic JP solo. Butterss steers the ship with a dubby bass groove threaded between the beats. Its as if the shades have been thrown open to greet the sun, but most importantly its a complete story. A narrative arc in under five minutes.

Jeff Parkers impact is hard to miss when discussing any forward-thinking, groove-oriented jazz and experimental music. Perhaps even more accurate in the case of ‘Mighty Vertebrate‘ is the influence of Tortoise, the long running post-genre group of which Parker is a member. Butterss Pokemans echoes the bands excellent 2001 album ‘Standards‘ as much as it does Four Tet or any of Junichi Masudas 8-bit school bus classics; but this is more than just inspiration, influence, or some detached version of a musical continuum. Butterss has played with Jeff Parker for years; Tortoises John Herndon did the cover art for ‘Mighty Vertebrate‘; these artists exist within the same close-knit community. Here Butterss finds themself firmly in the protg-to-peer pipeline.

Ultimately, each track on ‘Mighty Vertebrate‘ could be excavated and studied or simply taken at face value. Its a solid, mature, and endlessly fun glimpse into the world of an artist whose potential for growth is seemingly unlimited.

Tracklist:

Side A
1. Bishop
2. Shorn
3. Dance Steve
4. Ella
5. Lubbock

Side B
1. Pokemans
2. Breadrich
3. Seeing You
4. Counterpoint
5. Saturno