Pitchfork

Many adventures begin in the familiar and end in the unknown, but Dave Pajo's is more Odyssean in character-- picking up in the musical map's far-flung regions, his voyage has been a circuitous quest to reattain the familiarity of hearth and home. With Slint, he helped to invent the stark, dissonant style of post-rock that was rampant in the Midwestern 1990s underground; he spent a time coolly noodling in Stereolab; left a thumbprint in Tortoise's apocalyptic jazz; crafted minimal and lucid math-rock as M and Aerial M; survived Zwan. After the turn of the millennium, on Papa M Sings, Whatever, Mortal, and his self-titled 2005 LP, Pajo quite literally found his voice, and his glittering instrumental/electronics became backdrops for pensive, traditionally inclined folk songs instead of ends unto themselves.

So if 1968 feels like a milestone in Pajo's career, it's not because of any quantum leap in his songwriting-- he's sturdy and deliberate as ever-- but because it feels like a hard-won denouement. With its emphasis on traditional craft and instrumentation instead of brooding experimentation, 1968 finds Pajo fully inhabiting the rootsy folk-rock he's been warily circling for years. His songwriting aesthetic comes into sharp focus-- Pajo coaxes out serene, overcast melodies from music that's as ineffably weird as it is unostentatious, maximizing the subtleties of his utilitarian voice to wring every available drop of aphoristic intrigue from his meditations on spirituality, folkloric revisions, and sinister love songs.

Pajo has a long track record of releasing good albums that don't have any one mind-blowing song, working instead as impressionistic totalities. 1968 bucks that trend, and any discussion of it has to start with "Who's That Knocking", which sets the bar impossibly high for its consistently fine yet pale-by-comparison remainder and has two things that Pajo's dreamy washes usually lack-- an instantly memorable melody and subtle yet devastating dynamic shifts. Beginning at an ominous acoustic slither, it deftly pivots into a glassy lilt decorated with silvery tracers of electric guitar, and then effervesces into an airborne chorus, cycling seamlessly through these three modes for almost six minutes. Lyrically and vocally, Pajo rises to the occasion, engaging himself in a gnomic interlocution seething with gothic anxiety. His lyrics here bear traces of his time in Will Oldham's band, with their circumspect intimations about death, deals with the devil, and oedipal angst.

The rest of the album plays out Pajo's typical restraint, although it has more pep than anything he's heretofore produced as a solo artist. "Foolish King" finds him introspecting about the infinite subjectivity of personal morality over a winsome, ringing guitar lead: "Am I sinner or saint, oh, which one will I be?/ Only I may know this useless mystery." We get eerie flashes of specificity-- on the crunchy, spark-throwing rocker "We Get Along, Mostly", a cancer reference balloons up like a dark cloud in the summer-sky melody. This sort of razor-in-apple juxtaposition-- serene melodies with dark apparitions drifting at their peripheries-- is 1968's dominant trope. On the idyllic "Cyclone Eyes", for instance, you have to listen closely to realize Pajo's singing about locking someone in a basement with a gun to his head.

It's the sort of stuff that Xiu Xiu would dress in squalling tones more obviously suited to its content. Pajo favors the soft-sell, so that his poisoned valentines stay with you for even longer than it takes for them to psychically resolve, a little at a time, into the fullness of their horror and awe. If this is his spiritual homecoming, it reminds us that while home is where the heart is, the heart is filled with things much squirmier and harder to quantify than the sense of complacent well-being with which the maxim is associated.