Richard Edwards - Ghost Electricity/Vampire Draw (2022)

Due to a dastardly case of long-C.-diff that has left him unable to tour since 2017, Richard Edwards (in Indianapolis) and his comrades (in Los Angeles and Ojai) had already fine-tuned their own distance-recording machinery for 2020's The Soft Ache and the Moon, a set of sprawling short stories put to song, before the pandemic had even arrived--after which, the Los Angeles Review of Books called him "the most underrated songwriter of our time." Earlier this year, from his living room, Edwards beamed himself back to LA to track a single inspired by recent adventures in experimental health procedures in Chicago.

When the fog cleared several weeks later, he had an LP: Ghost Electricity/Vampire Draw. Produced by Edwards, Mike Bloom (Jenny Lewis), and Dave Palmer (Fiona Apple), it boasts a veritable all-star roster of collaborators including Jay Bellerose, Perla Batalla, Erin Rae, Johnny Flaugher, Jenny O, Maria Taylor, Benny Bock, Pete Thomas, Eric Gorfain and the Section Quartet, and countless engineers across LA county.

Where Soft Ache was sinuous and florid, Ghost Electricity/ Vampire Draw is muscular and vaporous. "Ketamine" soars over the rubble with a hushed passion for what might still have survived. "Holy Spirit" tumbles into some other branch of time where rapturous and off-color loving reigns supreme and heals all. "Love" morphs from a ballad into a prismatic frenzy of wordless revelry.

Bloom puts it like this: "Somehow, despite the Svengali nature of this record-making process, the climbing of the mountain by a million sherpas, the baby raised by the village, and the difficulty gathering and wrangling all the idiosyncrasies, this record is remarkably crystalline in its purpose."