Songs Album II: Vinyl LP

Label: Country Thyme
Release Date: 26th June

Sometimes you just need some soft pop that feels like a cosy but strange patchwork quilt, where you look at one of the patches has a Batman playing conkers or a squirrel flying a plane, cosy but on reflection there's a quirk with it. It's no surprise that on Aaron MF Olson's latest baroque soft folk pop album he nods to Jack Nitzsche, Van Dyke Parks, Robert Wyatt for inspiration.

‘Songs Album II’ is LA musician Aaron MF Olson’s Country Thyme
Records debut, his second ‘songs for singing’ album in just over a
decade of releasing music. Aaron’s a sweet fellow. He can be salty
on occasion, but it’s put to good use here. His songs mix satiric,
confessional and experimental lyric modes and his music’s cut from a
fine cloth of head-informed, classically sweet and soft pop / rock
modes. Most of all, ‘Songs Album II’ is music for listening.

To listen to and to play music; that’s been his highest aim, for most of
his life. His high school band was a post-rock group that morphed into
a surf music outfit; he’s been similarly guided by such polarities and
congruities in the time since. He’s released four albums of ‘Baywatch
Krautrock’ with LA Takedown and played and recorded in many other
projects, including but not limited to his experimental Music Tracing
Ensemble, exotica collective Other Delights, Bedouine, Coffin Prick,
Papa M, Tommy Peltier, Vetiver and ‘L.A.’s Most grateful Dead cover
band’, Richard Pictures.

Aaron’s solo credits include 2020’s switched-on essay, ‘Ranchera ‘22
{Synthesizer Interpretations of the Songs of José Alfredo Jiménez}’
and the 2022 New Age release, ‘For Dorothy’. He does film /
television composition too; most recently, the Original Motion Picture
Soundtrack for Matt Hewitt’s indie horror film, ‘Hoagie’.

If all this implies a wide palette of input / output, ‘Songs Album II’ has
it in reserve, framed scrupulously in a sequence of nice, light folk /
rock ditties, their spacey-yet-precise arrangements colourfully blowing
up the songs’ personal values. It’s Aaron, on most acoustic and
electric guitars and basses, keyboards, harmonica, synth and vocals,
Robin MacMillian on drums, Tara Milch flute, Michael Sachs clarinets,
Luke Csehak bassoon and trumpet, additional guitars and vocals
from Blue Broderick, Bart Davenport and Wayne Faler, keyboards
and vocals from Andrew Dorsett and vocals by Matt Popieluch,
making ‘Songs Album II’ a collection of widescreen, hi-def songs and
sounds.

Aaron’s voice is light-toned, gentle and tunefully raspy, falling
somewhere between Jack Nitzsche, Van Dyke Parks, Robert Wyatt
and personal inspirations John Simon, Stephen Pastel, Jim O’Rourke
and Kermit’s nephew, Robin. And Emmett Otter. Not a bad bunch to
be sharing the water with.