B-Side Guys

The premise is almost too honest to be a song: Dash Hammerstein sometimes closes the window during an actual rainstorm to play a fake rainstorm on his white noise app instead. “I know it’s not the same / it’s duller than the real thing / but I am recalibrating and it’s all that I can take.” Most songwriters would bury that admission or dress it up as a metaphor. Hammerstein just says it, which turns out to be more disarming than any amount of cleverness would be.

The Brooklyn-based composer and film scorer, whose work has premiered at Sundance and Tribeca and whose scores have appeared on Netflix, HBO, and PBS, describes the forthcoming self-titled album as a product of creative sobriety: no more word salad psychedelia, first-thought-best-thought material written over morning coffee. “Noise Machine” is the proof of concept. The lyrics track a restless mind racing toward connection while simultaneously retreating from it, thoughts “sudden and erratic as the ocean tides,” the peace of mind as foreign as the coffee in the cup.

The woodwind arrangement, performed by Michael Sachs and inspired by White Album-era McCartney and old music hall records, gives the whole thing a gentle absurdism that keeps it from curdling into self-pity. Hammerstein acknowledges the gag himself: it is a pretty goofy sentiment. But the goofiness and the genuine exhaustion underneath it coexist without canceling each other out.

Choosing the artificial over the real as a coping mechanism is the kind of thing that’s easy to mock and harder to admit. The song doesn’t resolve whether it’s working. Recalibrating, the lyric says, which is the most accurate word for a process that hasn’t finished yet.