Charlie Kaplan’s first solo album, Sunday (2020), was heavy on loose, guitar-based garage rock. The follow-up, last year’s Country Life in America, was more of a folk-leaning pop album. Kaplan takes a little from columns A and B with his third LP. As a result, Eternal Repeater may be Kaplan’s most satisfying solo release to date.
Kaplan, who also plays bass with Office Culture but sticks to rhythm guitar on the new record, assembled a small, mighty group of musician friends to record the stylistically varied but consistently engaging nine songs here: Andrew Daly Frank on lead guitar, Frank Meadows on bass, Ben Wagner on drums, and de facto Office Culture leader Winston Cook-Wilson on keyboards. This ensemble can capture the many different musical moods on Eternal Repeater, although the opening track, “Sun Come Up”, is deceiving in that it’s an instrumental with just Kaplan on acoustic guitar.
That serves as a low-key overture to the churning psychedelic folk-rock of “Everyone Calling Your Name”, which chugs along in a dreamy mid-tempo groove before erupting into some guitar-centric jamming, Frank’s guitar work, bringing to mind Jerry Garcia at his country-tinged finest. But occasionally, Eternal Repeater gives off a more sinister air, like on “Mescarole”. Recalling some of Neil Young‘s work with Crazy Horse, the track unspools with a solid 1970s rock vibe, with an odd, brief set of lyrics that recall an ugly bar incident: “Feel / Oh no / Asshole / You spilled my drink.” Along those same lines, the 1960s garage rock feel of “Feelin’ Alright” seems inspired by the monotone buzz of the Velvet Underground, complete with an angular, post-punk guitar solo.
Eternal Repeater’s first single, the ethereal “Cloudburst”, is the gentlest, most breathtaking moment on the record. With Nico Hedley assisting on guitar, the circular, acoustic-framed melody provides the necessary bliss as Kaplan sings while getting caught in the rain: “Every moment given is a moment gave away / Everything I’m saying is just what I had to say / Caught in a cloudburst all day.”
Eternal Repeater is also highly satisfying when it introduces epic tracks that let the band cut loose, such as the hypnotic “Idiot”, which pairs multiple verses with deft guitar interplay, and “Now That I’m Older”, which melds Beatlesque psychedelic pop with the jangle of Americana.
Perhaps the strangest moment is the one that provides the most immediate buzz: the record closes with “In a Little Bit of Time”, which can best be characterized as “Charlie Kaplan’s punk song”. Amidst Kaplan’s moody, intoxicating 1970s krautrock-leaning jams, he threw in some Ramones. The song, complete with insistent guitar riffing and vocal attitude straight out of a 1981 new wave single, could signal what’s to come for the next album, or it could just be Kaplan flipping the script because he can. Whatever the case, Eternal Repeater genuinely mesmerizes but also revels in shifting gears while remaining fresh.