Although Mutable Set is his fourth album, Los Angeleno Blake Mills is best known as a name in the credits. He’s produced Alabama Shakes (they won a Grammy), Laura Marling and Perfume Genius, among others.
Atmospheres are key to Mills’s output and Mutable Set is not so much a set of songs – recalling everything from Elliott Smith (May Later) to Spiritualized (Money Is the One True God) to his helpmeet here, Cass McCombs – as an exercise in humid world creation. Everything feels like it is pulsating away within an amniotic sac – in a good way – as instruments wander across the songs, as though orchestrating themselves. Mills can get the celebrated Pino Palladino (the Who) in on bass, and then subdue him to a low thrum.
The highlight here is Vanishing Twin, more than six minutes of prodigious noise-making, anchored by a thrumming loop, but Eat My Dust is an avant-jazz-folk revelation.
Directness does exist in this abstracted haze: Money Is the One True God might be nearly seven minutes of a mantric blues in which a well-placed piano run makes your blood go cold, but there is no debating what the song is trying to say.
