Behold The Spirit

Good guitar players crop up everywhere in music today, so distinguishing the ones who truly stand out becomes a Herculean task. William Tyler is making that task a little bit easier. The Nashville guitar player’s string theories keep you either pleasantly off guard or pleasantly inspired. He opens with “Terrace of the Leper King,” a penitent acoustic instrumental with intermittent horns and strings that add just the right amount of support to keep the tune from becoming yet another prelude in an already crowded acoustic canon. “Missionary Ridge” implies a gentle countryside stroll and sounds just like that, replete with field recordings of crickets and summer air. “Oashpe,” a reference to the book on magnetic fields and the demise of Atlantis, spreads its wings on a cloud of suspended chord combinations, before racing off into some intergalactic sunset.