Max Subar “Anything Could Be”

Chicago singer-songwriter’s highly promising debut album explores the ceaseless ebb and flow of life’s hopes and fears.

Recorded in a house on the shore overlooking a frozen lake in Wisconsin, while nature lay dormant beneath a landscape of snow and ice, Max Suber’s debut solo album encapsulates its surroundings with a sparseness that accommodates both stagnation and growth. Emerging from ten days of solitude, with only his guitar and a mobile recording rig for company, he then returned to his home studio with the framework for eleven songs, where the necessary texture and colour were added through additional sessions with the help of a handful of musicians, which included bandmates from his day job as guitarist with Case Oats. These arrangements have helped flesh out the live guitar and vocal takes without endangering their spontaneity, retaining the freshness and atmospheric vibe of the environment which inspired the songs, that collectively come together to create the album Anything Could Be.

The album opens with the title track, where Subar’s poetry invokes the memory of a dream and a desire for freedom that rides gently upon the support of a picked guitar and a subtle arrangement that rewards repeated listening and a keen ear, a remark that applies to the album as a whole. Subar’s languid vocal delivery rarely deviates in pace or pitch, drawing faint comparison to a latter-day Paul Simon, with the emphasis remaining firmly on the lyrical narrative that continuously gains credence from the sparse musical accompaniment that displays a deft understanding of the use of space. Other highlights include See Saw, where the inclusion of some delightful pedal steel creates a warm glow against the hypnotic tranquillity created by the poetic tone, and I Never, which benefits from an increase in tempo supplied by the percussive skills of Spencer Tweedy, guesting on the drum stool. Elsewhere, the combined use of double bass, violin and vibraphone enables Like You’ve Known it to resonate most closely with the wintry landscape that provided so much of the inspiration for the album, while the more expansive arrangement that supports As The Weather marks the song out as the album’s pinnacle. Here, Subar’s vocals reach an emotive zenith, buoyed perhaps by the more muscular musical support which collectively builds in crescendo to a chorus that is both uplifting and mesmerising.

With Anything Could Be, Max Subar has created an open-hearted album that grows with each listen, drawing inspiration from the spiritual landscape that saw him lay down the bones of these eleven songs, tapping into the frailties of the human condition in accepting the new and unknown, and applauding the courage that keeps us moving forward. If this debut offering is anything to go by, the future for Max Subar appears equally encouraging.