The Ease of Summer

Sam Prekop/Who's Your New Professor

Thrilljockey
Sam Prekop drives a big Mack truck of skill and arcane science through the leaden latent summer air like a faith healer through flesh. The summer. Remember those days of short pants, breasts, and near-naked spontaneity that taught you to ride a bike, that taught you to count your near friends and your free times dear, that taught you to throw a frisbee amid transplanted city girls on the Great Lawn at Central Park? Remember the simple slide into evening viewed through a slice of cooling humidity in the air? Remember easy living?
Deep in your heart, you know life isn't that simple, but if you take it fast enough and with enough gusto, if you take it all of an experiential piece, you can play along with yourself, pretend all those eighth-notes and off-beats, the algorithmic thrumming of your soul, the train under the street, the millions of obligations forgiven and enforced all around you really are simple and wonderful of themselves. With Who's Your Professor, Prekop brings all that to you at one more remove, stylizing it with his desperate-yet-unfettered aspirated vocals and refining it invisibly for you to take in the ludicrous gestalt of life refined as an essence for the ear, eighth-notes, off-beats, and high-energy jazz-hinting flourishes all. The very muted electronics and the unmistakable production give you at one and the same time the impression that it's a work of staggering simplicity and subtle, tweaked genius. And the guitar solo that reserved the long banquet hall for a couple of hours at the end of Dot Eye lacadaisically shoots a long snort of beatific lightning into your lobes. Imagine a "She's Not There" Carlos Santana working an electric guitar alseep inside a Picasso hanging on a wall inside the dream inside Garcia-Marquez's Eyes of a Blue Dog.
And I haven't even figured out what he's singing yet. This album is getting played all spring, all summer, all "all night," to invoke the poetic time/space the Breeders sing about on Last Splash. This is one for the record books.