If you were a Connecticut musician who wanted a great sounding album and didn’t mind if it took a while, Michael Deming was your guy for a stretch in the ’90s and early 2000s. First at Studio .45 in Hartford’s Colt building, and later in Enfield, Deming helped produce, engineer and mix beautiful records by national bands and local acts, including the Apples in Stereo, Beachwood Sparks, the Pernice Brothers, Jim White, Mike Ireland & Holler, the Butterflies of Love, Low-Beam, the Lilys and my onetime Hartford Courant colleague Deborah Hornblow.
Deming was a busy guy, though, and making an album with him was rarely a speedy process, especially if you were local without a label to help apply pressure. It took Hornblow seven years to finish her 2005 release “The Permanent Thing,” and while I don’t recall the specifics, Low-Beam definitely put in plenty of hours chipping away at their excellent 2011 album “Charge of the Light Brigade.” Each was a mere blip compared to the Alex Butter Field’s experience. The solo studio persona of Wallingford musician (and Happy Ending frontman) Hank Hoffman, the Alex Butter Field spent nearly 20 years finishing “Psychedelipop” and “Popsychle,” a pair of EPs that Hoffman started with Deming in 2002 and finally released last year. If that’s not quite Sisyphean, it’s close.
Yet Hoffman made all that time count. Together, the EPs comprise 13 tracks of hazy pop songs stacked with hooks and radiating a vintage psychedelic vibe. Yet despite the echoes of psych-pop past, the Alex Butter Field is doing its own thing on songs with densely packed arrangements, courtesy of Hoffman and his collaborators. They include a core band featuring Tom Smith on drums, Andy Karlok on bass, New Haven scene stalwart Dean Falcone on guitar and Butterflies of Love’s Scott Amore on keyboards and percussion. Amore also took over production duties when Deming’s focus turned increasingly toward making high-end recording microphones as Charter Oak Acoustic Devices.
Together, the band dials in the sound of chiming guitars pushed just over the line into scuzzy, along with crisp drums and fanciful adornments. There are handclaps and weird keyboards on “Psychedelipop” opener “Gardener,” for example, or candy-colored harmony vocals on “Rescue,” which also includes electric sitar and a woozy blend of strings and horns (with Yannis Panos from Mates of State on trumpet). The fun continues on “Popsychle,” which starts with an irresistible hook on “(I’m in the) Sunshine State.” There’s a keening electric harpsichord part from Deming on “Tear My Heart Out,” muscular electric guitars on “Snowflakes” and a very ’60s-eastern-tinged arrangement of strings and electric sitar on last song “Winter Light.”
The EPs aren’t so different thematically or musically — splitting the songs into two halves was more about allowing the music to stand out in shorter increments. “Tom Smith, the drummer, and I both felt that there might be so much going on in the arrangements that splitting up the project could work better — that 51 minutes might be more challenging on the ear than doling out the tracks as EPs,” Hoffman says. That’s a reasonable call: there’s a lot going on in these songs, and it’s a low-key pleasure to let the layers reveal themselves, bit by bit. Presenting these 13 tunes in two parts shows admirable restraint when it must have been tempting after 18 years to just fling them at listeners all at once.
Nearly two decades is a long time to stick so doggedly to a work in progress, but it’s a good thing Hoffman did. Along with tight songwriting and imaginative musical accompaniment, “Psychedelipop” and “Popsychle” show the value of perseverance, and it’s infinitely better to have these EPs late than not at all.