Pan•American

★★★★ The Patience Fader KRANKY. CD/DL/LP

Erstwhile Labradford mainstay’s elegiac eighth Pan•American long-player.

Mark Nelson’s music has always cast a dream-like spell, a minimal instrumental arsenal deployed to paint effulgent, immersive landscapes. As Pan•American, he has spent over two decades intermittently revisiting a locus where the infinite spatial halo of dub meets spare, ineffably American guitar lines, a permutation that speaks softly of huge things – great plains, Western skies, deep emotional wreckage…

The Patience Fader finds Nelson in something close to solo guitar mode; his signature etiolated twang occasionally augmented by splashes of lap steel, harmonica and distant, twinkling electronics. The album’s 12 intimate essays, described as “elegies as much as songs”, feel like ghostly, poignant testaments to our troubled times, and whether it’s the pretty, Tom Verlainelike meanderings of Outskirts, Dreamlit, North Line’s beauteous cosmic country swoops, or the ambient Western soundtrack drift of Grounded, an inescapable aura of sadness haunts proceedings.