It kind of feels like Salt Lake City’s Jack Rutter makes music the way certain people make soup, slowly, from whatever’s left in the house, with no intention of impressing anyone, but somehow it’s the best thing you’ve eaten in months. He combines bedroom pop with indie rock hits and a bit of autotune for a dreamy backdrop. His third album, BASE, as Ritt Momney, a great spoonerism of the Republican Mitt Romney, arrives not with a bang or a whisper but with the specific sound of someone pushing furniture around in a room above you at two in the morning. You can’t tell if they’re moving in or moving out.
The album feels like it was cut to tape, live in a room, with two collaborators and a minimum of digital meddling. You can hear the air in it. You can hear the hesitation. The guitars don’t shimmer so much as lean or drift, and the drums occupy physical space in the mix the way a piece of furniture does—you’d notice immediately if they were gone.
“I’DDO” is the sound of a snow globe someone forgot to shake, all dim and suspended. “GUNNA” builds from a whisper into something that feels vaguely like an argument you’re winning, though you’re not sure what the argument is about. “The Tank”—a metaphor for self-sabotage is so graceful that you forget the whole premise is completely insane. It is catchy in the way that a phrase you shouldn’t find funny keeps making you laugh.
