Album Review: Rostam, ‘American Stories’

Since co-founding Vampire Weekend 20 years ago and producing the band’s first three albums, Rostam Batmanglij has enjoyed a unique profile as a pop songwriter and studio wizard, especially for a guy whose sound never really left his old band’s highbrow sensibilities behind. When pop and R&B starting getting artier in the 2010s, and indie music began moving closer to pop, he helped to shape that transition with his contributions to innovative modern classics like Frank Ocean’s Blonde, Solange’s A Seat at the Table, and Haim’s Women in Music Pt. III, as well as work for other top stars.

A Rostam track might remind you of contemporary hip-hop just as easily as it might evoke chamber music, or incorporate musical elements that reflect his Iranian heritage while seeming wholly in step with whatever was happening next at the forefront of American music. In any other historical period, proposing such a career trajectory would’ve seemed mildly insane — like if Peter Buck had followed up Fables of the Reconstruction by producing Whitney Houston instead of the Feelies. But in our era of melting genre borders, Rostam’s path has seemed as casually inevitable as it is undeniably impressive.

As a solo artist, he specializes in a kind of grand bedroom-pop, elusive and dream-like yet spacious and baroque, with his playfully distracted lyrics grasping toward epiphanies that seem to hang just out of reach. His third LP, American Stories, is dazzlingly ambitious but warmly down-to-earth. To get a sense of the bracing level of musical know-how on display, just check out album opener “Like a Spark,” which imagines Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks in a fantasy past where Van was into music from the Middle East, sort of the same way George Harrison was into music from India. Rostam ventures through the slipstream playing piano, mandolin, celeste, Minimoog, and Mellotron, as well as about half a dozen other instruments — capping it off with a guest solo on the saz, a Turkish string instrument. “Back of a Truck” brings the California folk-rock sunshine with booming snare snaps that might’ve come off an Eighties record by Cameo, while a sitar and steel guitar chip in to max the melody during a breakdown that sounds like a psychedelic line dance. Country also comes up as an influence on the extremely pretty “Different Light,” and classical strings hit like mirrorball synths over a rambunctious beat on “Hardy,” as Clairo delivers a charming shared vocal. 

American Stories is just nine songs, but pretty much every centimeter is garlanded with grabby bits of sonic filigree. Yet this isn’t just a talented producer flexing his studio muscles for the sake of it. The back half is comprised of less showy songs that fold midlife introspection into broader concerns. “The road to death/Is one we’re all on,” he informs us “The Road to Death,” a ballad where his resigned view of mortality evokes Dylan or Leonard Cohen. “To Feel No Way,” which has the somber soft-angled swing of a cool jazz ballad, finds him walking alone through New York, ending up at a table for one on Orchard Street and savoring the weird freedom of being solo. “Forgive Is To Know” opens up by mapping out a feelings-heavy drive through New England and slowly accrues beauty and wisdom as it grows.

It’s hard not to hear political overtones in an album called American Stories by an artist of Iranian descent arriving in this current moment. Even if he wasn’t thinking of the war we’re in right now when he sat down to write it, the album’s most arresting song, a tenderly bereaved-feeling folk tune called “Come Apart,” is a realistically guarded demand for hope in hellish times. He offers images of burnt olive trees with roots that are too strong to kill and kids who are smart enough not to fall for their parents’ lies. “I know that the world will come apart/I hope that the pain is gonna stop,” he implores, mixing fatalism and resilience. The closing ballad, “The Weight,” seems to land between a lefty protest hymn and a coming-of-age anthem. These songs are memorable enough that they could’ve been A+ submissions to one of the A-list artists he works with. But it’s good he didn’t. They sound better as reflections of his own evolving story.