Before Moodymann rewired his brain, Stiltz idolized Elliott Smith, mentioned here by name in the slow-burning closer “15,” and he cites Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse as an inspiration. Having grown up between Stockholm and California, he’s recently been reconnecting with the Golden State and its highways, motels, and rest stops as these songs are littered with references to the I-5, Pasadena, and Santa Rosa. Totally suggests the pensive headspace of an adult returning to his childhood haunts trying to make sense of it all.
Writing diaristic, country-leaning soft-rock, Stiltz also touches on the work of David Berman and Bill Callahan. The smoothness of Knock Knock echoes through the rolling mid-tempo grooves of Stiltz’s unshowy arrangements, featuring drifting pedal steel from Theo Stocks and tasteful embellishments from Ana Roxanne on piano and vocals. As a lyricist, Stiltz has a knack for conversational detail relayed in the drawl of his favorite New Yorker, Lou Reed, and he’s got a keen eye for lives glimpsed in passing, like on “Leader of Men,” written from the perspective of a bartender getting by on a “dayshift buzz and vape-fume breaks.” Stiltz conjures these Americana vignettes with ease, and he gets off a number of world-weary couplets with Berman-esque flourish, like, “Time will heal all the wounds/Time cannot come too soon” on the gently-chugging “Dang Me (An-sich-selbst-saugen).”
There’s no shortage of songwriters ripping from the well-thumbed pages of Berman and Callahan. Too often, it feels as though Stiltz is doing a competent impression without imparting his own insights. He’s able to fashion a chorus around a droll phrase, as he does on “How About That” and “Must Be Nice,” but these moments are left hanging without the introspection needed to ground them. As a result, Stiltz’s observations lean toward glib rather than casually profound. And invariably, evoking the greats is the quickest way to cut yourself down to size. On “Totally,” Stiltz vows to “drink five billion beers/Just to sit with all my tears,” which is hard not to read as a rehash of Berman’s gut-wrenching “fifty thousand beers” that “wash against me like the sea into the pier.”
