Over the last few weeks (“Five weeks? Two days? Help me to recollect”), news outlets and science communities have been touting a rebound of sorts of the natural world due to people quarantining—the waters of the Venice canals have become clear again; the glaciers have showed slower melting rates; carbon emissions have been reduced; etc. Such a “return” to the [more] natural, beauty of the planet, is reflected in the introspective prepared-guitar music of Brooklyn-based artist Dean Cercone, on his new self/quarantine-released album, Cardinals And A Grey Cat. From minute one, the humble, singular voice on the album, simultaneously instills a solitude we all currently feel, a nostalgia for the normalcy of our not-so-distant pasts, and a sense of hope, a sense of wonder, to which we all currently cling.
Cercone ponders the world, and his place in it, on these tracks, calming both self and listener with his hands and his instrument and having something for them to do. Strings twang and stumble and tinker on the Title Track, like the insides of some unknowable clock of some nonlinear universe. The whole of the cosmos might as well have taken on the bodies of the animals of the album’s title, as Cercone notes that they appeared, and remained, during the entirety of its recording. Flutters of his picking on “Internet Blues” and “March Of 2020,” almost embody the flapping of wings on their perch, and the quiet inquisitiveness of the furry friend. He trails off into areas of detune, very rarely, as though to create his own discords, and then triumph upon the re-entry into the more-than-pleasant resonance; as though to remind us that we’ll make it through this yet.