Acoustic guitarist Daniel Bachman has been a teenaged protégé of Jack Rose and an early collaborator with Ryley Walker. He may be 26 years old, but he’s been around too long to be considered a new kid anymore. He’s had enough time for his music to go through some discrete phases, and now he’s pulling it all together. “The Brightleaf Blues,” which spills over both sides of this LP, bridges the drone-based experimentation and the purposefully questing fingerpicking that he’s previously parceled out to separate records and makes them coexist so harmoniously that it seems impossible that they were ever apart. Other tunes mine a reflective vein that he’s previously sailed over, imparting an aura of solitude that resonates with the music’s solitary execution. Daniel Bachman is the guitarist’s most emotionally complex and stylistically integrated work to date.
—Bill Meyer
