Bryan Dubay – Call Your Mother
At a time when music often feels fleeting, Buffalo’s Bryan Dubay has delivered Call Your Mother, a deeply personal, full-length album whose careful, deliberate construction invites you to slow down and truly absorb it. Continuing to explore the atmospheric terrain between indie rock and chamber folk, the record showcases Dubay’s comprehensive role as performer, producer, and engineer. While he enlists talent for certain string and percussion parts, the album’s cohesive vision is distinctly his own, a product of a very specific melodic focus.
The album is framed by Dubay himself as an “exercise in gratitude,” a concept that finds its footing through the music’s emotionally intelligent explorations of life, loss, and connection. He cites George Harrison’s slide guitar work and Elliott Smith’s songwriting as primary influences, and these are not just casual touchstones. The slide guitar, prominent throughout, is used not for bluesy grit but as Harrison often did: a fluid, lyrical voice that expresses a yearning and tenderness that words alone can’t capture. This pairs seamlessly with an Elliott Smith-esque approach to structure—intimate, close-mic’d vocals and acoustic foundations that feel both delicate and intricately constructed.
This “chamber folk” designation is earned by the sheer delicacy of the arrangements. The songs are built upon Dubay’s acoustic guitar and vocals, but they are consistently embellished with orchestral and sometimes electronic textures—a swell of cello, precise drips of piano notes, an inconspicuous synth pad. The arrangements feel like a house of cards: so carefully balanced that their fragility becomes a kind of strength, a quiet confidence that they will hold their shape. It creates this sound that is at once moody and tender, introspective and shimmering.
The record opens with the title track, a comfortable stroll of an introduction to the album’s sonic palette, where Max Jaffe’s drumming provides a gentle momentum for the expressive slide guitar. This is followed by “I Love Talking To Myself,” which offers a beautiful juxtaposition between its unassuming, unaltered acoustic strumming and the lush production of the song’s instrumental backdrop. The song’s theme of self-acceptance is stated with a disarming honesty: “I love talking to myself / but I look crazy in the grocery store / I’d rather face the consequences / than forget what I came here for.”
The album’s mid-section deepens this introspective mood. “Asunder” is a melodic highlight, its arrangement enriched by Alex Cousins on cello and Sally Shaefer on violin, recalling the lush, textured folk of artists like Sea Wolf. This track, along with the existential musings of “Being Nothing” (“where will I go / when nothing isn’t even a thing?”) and the anti-regret lyrical offerings on “What If,” creates a thematic core: a quiet pondering of mortality, consequence, and connection.
The latter half of the record sinks profoundly into this affective, melancholic space. “San Luis” is a standout, its sparse beauty and returning slide guitar evoking the early, isolated feel of Bon Iver. This leads to the closer, “Seven,” a fittingly sparse and wrenching finale. It’s here the “house of cards” analogy feels most apt; the instrumentation recedes, leaving the honest vocal performance to resonate in the space. The album proper is followed by three live studio versions of earlier tracks, a welcome inclusion that strips back a few layers to reveal the durable, well-crafted songwriting at the very center of the project. Call Your Mother is now streaming, but would probably sound better on a warm, crackly vinyl. Order one here.
Categorised in: Album of the Week
This post was written by Ronald Walczyk