Wendy Eisenberg: Viewfinder review – insightful jazz voyage into life after laser eye surgery

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.

Structurally, file this with Silvia Tarozzi’s luminous Mi Specchio e Rifletto but Eisenberg’s styles are drawn from Americana and jazz, lashed together with a distinctive guitar sound (they are a member of Bill Orcutt’s Guitar Quartet). Notably, they aren’t just a great player, but have a truly handsome tone that comes off like Cary Grant walking into a diner full of ordinary joes. Their vocals are what might split opinion, being in the continuum of breezy naivety that includes Kimya Dawson and Regina Spektor. It’s a novel mix that blurs genre to bring acute clarity in sound.