Fernando Perdomo 2025
American melodicist deploys tranquil expectancy to add contrast to his year-round array of tidal scrutiny.
Waves 8
Prior to the eighth volume of this series, one could detect little correlation between Joe Galdo’s photographs which inspired Fernando Perdomo to commit to its twelve installments and the latter’s music, yet the previously tentative ties become apparent now. Still, concentrating on a calm-before-the-storm mood would seem too simple for Perdomo who, instead, focused on the melancholy underlying such a liminal state. The listener has to know that Fern doesn’t shoehorn various numbers from his vast cache into the shore-dwelling concept but composes a fresh batch of ten tunes within the month preceding the issue of a next “Waves” specifically for the new album, so they all come from the same headspace. As a result, there’s an inherent concept in each of the chapters, and what’s on offer here should provide a wide perspective for the entire idea, and if the cuts on display comprise a shade of foreboding, the dark streaks only enrich the whole cycle.
It’s no coincidence that this album is set in motion with, well, “The Motion” whose thunderous groove and muscular twang can’t conceal sadness permeating the piece’s flow and getting overtly manifested in fluid guitar lines which will briefly imitate seagulls’ cries, while “Current” hides harmonically enhanced despair behind the upbeat, surf-flavored front. However, whereas the bass-laden “Fire Water” and “Rainy Day Embrace” feel subdued, as though trying not to simmer, and the sparse “The Cool Down” sifts emotional delicacy through sonic tension, “A Good Haul” blends Greek and Hawaiian motifs to reflect a fisherman’s rapture, and the barely-there “Love Is An Echo” – contradicting “True Passion Is Like A Storm” from "Waves 3" – finishes the album with a whiff of sweet fatigue. Anticlimactic, perhaps, yet perfectly logical, because, adhering to the “glass house” maxim but allowing a tightly woven six-string solo to soar, “The Porcelain Palace” also carefully avoids puncturing the record’s serene surface with a riff, and “Cousins” pushes its pensive roll behind Fernando’s belligerent drumming.
So its quite surprising when the autobiographical “Florida Man” – an instrumental, as is the rest of the series – begins to mix psychedelia with funk: that’s when smiles must lighten up the audience’s faces. A buoyant delight of an album.
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