Phish keyboardist Page McConnell has shared his fourth solo album, Something Will Land, available now digitally and on audiophile-grade black vinyl via his own Keyed Records. The album arrives alongside a revealing profile of McConnell by writer Grayson Haver Currin in GQ.
An exquisite space of ambient afterglow, Something Will Land feels as if Page McConnell simply slipped behind his instruments and waited to get lost, arriving at a place for settling in amid all the world’s ever-increasing entropy. The album – which features a striking cover image by renowned conceptual artist John Baldessari – arrives just four years after the poignant pandemic meditations of 2021’s Maybe We’re The Visitors, marking the shortest gap between McConnell’s solo LPs thus far. McConnell set to work on Something Will Land almost immediately after finishing Maybe We’re The Visitors, beginning the sessions with two seemingly elementary but absolutely essential breakthroughs. First, he reconfigured his Burlington, VT studio so that, for the first time, he was able to play, record, and engineer his piano pieces entirely by himself, with no one else in the room. McConnell then decided to blend the piano with a panoply of synthesizers after having portioned them in the past. Thus, he let himself be surrounded by electronic and acoustic sounds all at once, fully immersed in the instruments.
Each of the eight gorgeous instrumentals McConnell created for Something Will Land feels like a sculptural sanctuary, a hideaway from the hustle of life and the bustle of a band that is constantly busy reinventing itself. McConnell embedded beautiful little melodies amid these long-distance hums, anchors that give these drifts local gravity. “The Trees Were Blue” begins with a series of long, luminescent tones and scrambled signals, but, in the final third of this six-minute wonder, the piano marches triumphantly through the fog, as undaunted by the journey as a stranger’s smile. Elsewhere, “Mystery Meat” feels like an earthbound echo of Brian Eno’s Another Green World, while “Borrowed Scenery” is a piece of perpetual ascendance, McConnell’s rising piano line tugging at the wobbly drones that float beneath it.
Perhaps the most cohesive solo work of McConnell’s career, Something Will Land is a deep exhalation as the sun slips past the horizon at last, a welcome comedown to where the world slows just enough to notice how beautiful your surroundings have become.
PAGE MCCONNELL
SOMETHING WILL LAND
(Keyed Records)
Tracklist:
Side A
Amaranth
Borrowed Scenery
Something Will Land
Weightless
Side B
Mystery Meat
The Trees Were Blue
Octopi
Dropping In
