Consumer Guide Album

Clay Harper: Bleak Beauty [self-released, 2018]
In a counterpart to Mount Eerie's A Crow Looked at Me, where solitary guitarist Phil Elverum processed the shocking loss of his wife Genevieve to pancreatic cancer, Harper honors the passing of his longtime partner Stephanie Gwinn, who succumbed even faster to a brain tumor. But where Elverum's miserable minimalism grabs and haunts you, the mediated art blues of a shifting ensemble of Harper's pals is less devastated and less literal, though it never quite compels the total attention it repays. Lyric worth absorbing: "Tells me what to think and objects to what I say / I don't know why / But I like it that way." And how about: "It's me again / I'll hold your hand / I'll be your man forever / But you sigh and then / Squeeze my hand / Say what if I don't get better"? B+