Wild Pink frontman John Ross had just started writing songs for the follow-up to his band’s 2021 critical breakthrough, A Billion Little Lights, when he was hit with a cancer diagnosis. Even as he began undergoing surgical treatments, he kept writing—about matters vast and existential, like ghostly visitations, revelatory nighttime beach strolls, hospital bracelets, and “a quiet moment by the maple tree.”
The result was reams of fractured poetry, at times grounded, strange and otherworldly at others, but always filled with deep emotion—a few clunky lines notwithstanding. Across changing landscapes and through time, it’s easy to get lost in Ross’s twisting narratives, and to admire the profundity of familiar but deeply felt sentiments like “I love you so much.” The resulting album, ILYSM, is quaveringly beautiful and intimate, reflecting the deeply personal nature of Ross’s songs.
But only about half the time do the music and arrangements match the ambition or emotionality of his lyrics. Though the NYC-based trio is joined by several guest musicians here (most prominently pianist David Moore and veteran pedal steel ace Mike Brenner, but also Julien Baker and J Mascis), large stretches of the hour-plus-long album are stripped to the bare essentials. Frequently, bassist Arden Yonkers and drummer Dan Keegan are abetted only by stately piano, acoustic guitar, and Ross’s whispercore vocals, which effectively convey the sadness of his lyrics but none of their other emotional facets.
This is hardly an ill-advised way to render a very personal album about grappling with mortality—just a predictable one. Taken individually, the songs on ILYSM are all downright gorgeous, but by the time you get to “War on Terror,” a trembling five-minute acoustic ballad, after a string of several other trembling five-minute acoustic ballads, things start to feel monotonous.
Whatever Ross’s limitations as a singer and arranger, though, when he brings his guitar playing to the fore, the results are much more expressive and gratifying. The freewheeling “Cahooting the Multiverse” is similar in timbre to many of the songs that follow—delicate, ponderous, lots of piano and acoustic guitar—but has something too many of those songs lack: a lead guitar line. It’s exceedingly simple—just a few solitary notes recurring between verses—but it’s the well-considered space between those notes that grants the song a particular sense of grandeur.
Naturally, Ross’s pristine slide work on “See You Better Now” isn’t as flashy as the Mascis guest solo that appears on the same track, but it’s pitch-perfect for a brisk, strummy song that sounds like it could have been a hit for Tom Petty or George Harrison in their respective late-’80s Jeff Lynne periods. But “Sucking on the Birdshot” is also Ross’s shining moment as a guitarist on ILYSM, opening with woozy, careening blasts of distortion before settling into a triumphant chord progression scarred by dissonance and feedback. The guitars disappear for a few minutes while Ross quietly intones about dying alone, but that meditation feels more profound for the disorienting chaos of noise that surrounds it.
ILYSM’s most adventurous moments are its emotional climaxes. The slippery and bewitching title track piles robotic-sounding vocals over a pulsating synth line in an unusual but inspired accompaniment for the album’s sweetest, most romantic vocal melody. It’s spooky and disorienting—and an especially revealing peek into a life in the process of being turned upside down.
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