White Sky

It's not that Archer Prewitt hasn't made excellent music in the past — his fine solo debut In the Sun aside, there are also a number of outstanding releases recorded with the Coctails and the Sea & Cake — but White Sky is a revelation nonetheless, a majestic, beautifully cinematic evocation of autumnal melancholia crafted with meticulous sophistication. With titles like "Summer's End," "Last Summer Days" (sequenced back-to-back, no less), and "Final Season," the album's thematic ambitions are fairly self-explanatory, but what's impressive is how vividly Prewitt captures the sad inevitability of time's passage; although always a gifted songwriter, on White Sky his skills as an arranger make a huge leap forward, with gorgeously forlorn strings and horns lending color and depth to his languid, spacious pop melodies. Even the most robust moments, like the opening "Raise on High" and the propulsive "Motorcycles," possess unexpected complexity and intricacy, but it's the epic centerpiece "Walking on the Farm" that reveals White Sky's boldest ambitions, its bare-bones homespun melody blooming into an instrumental coda of magnificently pastoral grandeur.