Bruce Hornsby’s New Album Is Complex and Untrendy. That’s Why It’s So Good.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/arts/music/bruce-hornsby-absolute-zero-review.html

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One way for a songwriter to invigorate a long career is to keep breaking routines, to change up methods and parameters and solve different puzzles with every album. It’s a modus operandi that has carried Bruce Hornsby from radio hits in the 1980s through bluegrass, jazz, a stint in the Grateful Dead and, lately, collaborations with a younger-generation fan, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. “Absolute Zero,” his 21st album, is one more daring, rewarding turn in his catalog: 10 knotty, thoughtful yet rambunctious songs that juggle scientific concepts, history and human relationships.

“Absolute Zero” makes a 180-degree pendulum swing from Hornsby’s 2016 album, “Rehab Reunion.” On that record, Hornsby set aside the piano for songs built around the dulcimer, with basic folky harmonies and string-band-centered arrangements. “Absolute Zero,” in contrast, doubles down on piano virtuosity and musical intricacies: odd meters, polytonality, bustling counterpoint. In the new songs, Hornsby addresses a complex, distressing world with complex music, offering not an escape but a cleareyed recognition of 21st-century pressures and longings.

In 2019, “Absolute Zero” is decisively untrendy. Its songs are dense, literate, hand-played and largely acoustic (though a collaboration with Vernon, a forlorn lover’s plaint titled “Cast-Off,” does slip in some electronics). Rather than build productions with synthetic sounds, for half of the album Hornsby brought in yMusic, the contemporary chamber sextet that has also worked lately with Paul Simon, and its violinist and arranger Rob Moose; other songs use string orchestras. Hornsby then juxtaposed the disembodied classical ensembles with sinewy little studio bands that can kick and swing in any meter. One of the puzzles Hornsby seems to have set for himself is seeing just how many pointillistic motifs he can set in motion without getting in the way of his voice.

Ambition and exuberance merge in songs like “The Blinding Light of Dreams,” with pensive lyrics flung into complicated motion. “The Blinding Light of Dreams” reflects on the history of racism in the South, racing along on an insistent 13-note piano pattern and dodging dissonant interjections from yMusic. And “Voyager One” is a kind of multidimensional hoedown, with piano and yMusic meshing in overlapping riffs while Hornsby sings about space exploration and wonders if humanity will destroy itself before Voyager makes contact with other life-forms. “Let’s break out of our orbits, fix the world we all neglect/We share this little planet, our neighbors need respect,” he sings.

Hornsby draws on science terms to get personal. In the title song of “Absolute Zero,” he imagines being cryogenically preserved for a century, awaiting “Another chance, maybe better next time”; sparse piano and sustained woodwinds suspend his voice as the drummer Jack DeJohnette pinpoints time still passing.

In “Fractals,” Hornsby maps the infinitely replicating, mathematically generated chaos of fractals onto a romance: “Our love is a fractal/Curves and shapes irregular,” he sings. But first comes a brittle, two-handed, stop-start piano part that doesn’t quite establish a key or a beat. While he sings, percussion pecks at offbeats before settling into 4/4, while piano and pizzicato strings continue to pelt him with syncopation.

Amid all the musical antics, Hornsby doesn’t lose perspective. The grain of his voice and his folky sense of melody still hold together all of the songs’ odd machinations. And midway through the album, he touches down on the kind of cozy, empathetic song that established him in the 1980s and continue to dot his albums.

“Never in This House,” written with Chip DeMatteo, yearns for a stable family home where “all our problems disappear.” The piano is rich and hymnlike, the chamber ensemble is a supportive mini-orchestra; the music fulfills what the refrain — never in this house” — will not. It’s a brief point of repose on an album that thrives on its own restlessness.