I got my first pair of glasses recently – a light prescription I didn’t think I would notice, but they delivered such a sharpening of the world that I’m having to learn to look again. These experiences – how we adjust when sight is corrected; how eyes heal – are what concerns Wendy Eisenberg on their latest album Viewfinder, and not metaphorically: it’s a song cycle about getting laser eye surgery.
It opens deceptively simply with Lasik, which promises a singer-songwriter album with light-footed lyrical delivery and pensive guitar. But its structure quickly spins out into something far more interesting and impressionistic; bold for the territories it traverses, unfurling as a song suite with swathes of instrumental interludes and unexpected shifts in pace. There is skeletal brass over rolling cymbals in Afterimage; pacy jazz in Two Times Water where Eisenberg’s guitar and voice waft through in canon over bubbling percussion. Viewfinder (Intro) sits at track seven, collapsing and resolving before the dissonant guitar of the title track follows.
