The Early Album Release Show
Solar Myth
11312 S Broad St.
Philadelphia
March 1, 2026
‘Why Do We Like Music?’ goes a recent article headline in The New Yorker. Because it slaps? Next question. All kidding aside, the piece was about musical anhedonia – basically taking a scientific, how-does-the-brain-work angle to look at how and why we derive pleasure from music – and it did get me thinking: whenever I’m listening to something new I’m wondering, who is this for, who is the ideal listener? Because not all music is alike anymore than all games are alike; some games are fun, for instance, whereas board games are not. (Fight me in the comments!) There’s a well-known anti-audiophile quote attributed to Alan Parsons, perhaps best known for engineering albums some people think are good, like Abbey Road and Dark Side of the Moon: “Audiophiles don’t use their equipment to listen to music, they use music to listen to their equipment.” (The actual quote was something drier about the role of room acoustics in making for a good listening environment, and that fancy gear alone isn’t really enough.) My thought is: if that makes them happy, so what? We all hear differently and hear different things in the same songs, and I love that. Art is a disagreement, and that’s part of the fun.
(Also, quick aside: the fellow in the article only gave examples of not digging classical music. Maybe try some New Orleans bounce, my guy?)
When it comes to art music, avant-garde music, free jazz and experimental music and aleatory music and all the other derivations, we even get away from “music” per se: a lot of that stuff is infinitely more interested in sound exploration, timbre, and inventing novel structures. It’s no more or less artful than song craft – just scratching different itches.
I’d say that the recent work of Philly duo The Early is getting into that kind of experimental territory. The live room at Solar Myth was packed last night to celebrate the release of their new album, I Want To Be Ready, which came out just last Friday, via Island House Recordings. The duo – Philly-based Alex Lewis on electric guitars and synth, the now-living-in-Chicago Jake Nussbaum on drums and percussion – have been described by Chris Forsyth as managing “the neat trick of maintaining a sparkling engagement through mood, rhythm, and texture while somehow managing to avoid explicit statements of melody or groove,” and I agree. Melody and groove being operative, “hey, here comes some music” terms, obviously.
Aside from the set-opening old song “Lap Swim,” a composition that, in this live iteration, was firmly in the spirit of open-tuned, Mixolydian American Primitive and midwest emo, The Early mostly stuck to their new album, performed front to back (they added a Ry Cooder cover at the end). This material struck me as, essentially, Twombly-fied post rock: Lewis plays the guitar in a painterly, gestural, geometric and textural way, relying on pedals and loops and brief, gentle stabs at notes, other times scraping and dragging the pick around like a just-getting-warmed-up Ira Kaplan. Nussbaum plays the kit with a similar approach, experimenting with turning the snare heads off and on, rolling a ball around the surface of the snare and looping the results, and playing with an array of mutes and handheld percussion instruments. It could sometimes feel like you were hearing two or three different pieces played at the same time, with Lewis and Nussbaum like twin machines churning at their own pace, their loops pleasantly out of sync. Set highlight “Sand Clock” began like a patient reverie, Nussbaum’s soft rhythms like brushing a broodmare’s tail, as Lewis’s guitar was the storm – or the wolf – at the door, getting noisier and more insistently agitated, blowing down the barn. Is it music? If so, it’s heavily deconstructed, even by the already-abstract standards of instrumental music; think of it as Jim O’Rourke meets Finnegan’s Wake, or something. Why do we listen to music? Well, because it slaps, in myriad ways. I didn’t get chills or have my breath taken away, but I was smiling ear to ear throughout, my synapses probably lighting up like roman candles. Forsyth’s right as rain: that’s a neat trick. Next question!
