Yasmin Williams is without doubt one of the most ingenious guitar gamers of the final decade, an artist dedicated to deploying seemingly each method possible to coax new sounds and concepts out of her instrument. She hammers the strings and wallops the physique and faucets the frets; she strums and drums and plucks with such pace and agility that her performances really feel like sleights of palms, as if she owes as a lot to Ricky Jay as she does to Leo Kottke. But it surely’s all in service of her tautly, gracefully composed songs, which she approaches with a storyteller’s eye for setting and specificity, simply as a lyricist would possibly. Williams didn’t merely write her 2022 album City Driftwood in the course of the tumultuous yr of 2020, however wrote it about these onerous occasions. “I Marvel (Track for Michael)” was one in every of a number of impressed by the demonstrations she attended in Washington, DC. However as an alternative of evoking the commotion and peril of dealing with off in opposition to the police, Williams was rather more within the heat camaraderie she felt for her fellow demonstrators, all of whom have been taking related dangers towards a standard objective.
Heat camaraderie of a distinct type defines her follow-up, Acadia. It’s a brilliant, imaginative growth of Williams’ sound, gregarious the place City Driftwood sounded ruminative and solitary. Nearly all of those songs function a distinct set of gamers: The people duo of Allison de Groot and Tatiana Hargreaves coloration in “Hummingbird” with banjo runs and fiddle reels, respectively; the Nashville cosmic-jazz musician Wealthy Ruth provides mushy synths to “Virga.” Dom Flemons performs the rhythm bones on “Cliffwalk” as Williams’ riffs subdivide like fractals, including unimaginable grace notes, and Immanuel Wilkins concludes the album with an ecstatic alto saxophone solo. That motley assortment of musicians displays the number of Williams’ pursuits, which vary from folks and old-time to jazz and classical composition.
Acadia takes her removed from the streets of DC and deep into the woods and mountains. She indicators as a lot with the track titles, but in addition with the music itself. “Hummingbird” flutters by a backyard, the busy guitar and banjo buzzing round a central theme and settling into a well-recognized old-time jig. This track and several other others settle into what seems like an early ending, solely to take flight once more, as if Williams’ thoughts, like a hummingbird’s wings, is at all times in movement. On “Harvest,” she picks lengthy melodic strains on her guitar, which sound like they’ve much less to do with the bodily labor of bringing in crops and extra to do with the pleasure of exhaustion. You possibly can nearly see the solar setting over empty fields.
