Walt McClements: On a Painted Ocean Album Review

Opener “A Painted Ship” begins simply enough, with McClements doubling and then tripling an accordion melody that feels innately forlorn, like a sailor’s lament. He steadily stretches and warps the tones beneath that main theme, cultivating dread so powerful it conjures slipping into an abyss. The title track, though, offers the inverse. McClements starts with an anxious digital sequence, a snippet of glissando bouncing back and forth like an Atari game cartridge damaged by water. It is too busy to be beautiful, a cracked-mirror representation of a life lived between multiple screens. But McClements cuts in above it with a deep and mighty theme, its bombast evoking some kind of overfed beast staggering into a room to take charge. It marches over the tremulous hum, commanding the space as it guides whoever’s listening and whoever needs it a hand toward the other shore.

That safety, though, does not last. McClements groans into “Parade,” the 10-minute masterstroke that sets up the gorgeous and triumphant finale, “Clattering.” Accordion and organ rumble and sigh as if awaking to a barrage of bad news, a feeling that Nealand reinforces when she blows in like some winter gale. She and McClements stand there in righteous rage for a long time, her saxophone contorting and fretting and blaring over his multilayered hums, occasionally so heavy they feel like the crust of the world. They slowly fade away, as if exhausted from exasperation.

But then, for the first time in many years, there’s McClements’ voice, stammering through a question about what would give someone confidence. He’s talking to Casey Leigh, a confidant who has taken classes in administering Narcan. Methodically but tenderly, she talks him through the procedure before assuring him that he can learn how to do rescue breathing, too, to literally exhale someone back to life.

When I first heard On a Painted Ocean, the exchange mystified me, especially the way it seemed to emerge out of nowhere: Had I overlooked earlier dialogue? Had I missed a memo that this entire LP was a memorial for a lost friend? Did it feel like maybe McClements was trading on one grief of the day to add some frisson at the end of an album? But the more I’ve heard it, the more I’ve understood that it does what so much of my favorite art does—hands me something to carry into the world, to make my load and hopefully someone else’s a little more tolerable. McClements sets a life-saving lesson to an electrifying and affirming sound, then makes his exit with an exquisite accordion piece that limns a new day rising, at least one more time. It is a practical gift from a friend, the kind you keep forever.