Pterous was McDonald’s way of building guitar orchestras out of grief, single-note phrases layered over and over, each finished piece dedicated to one specific person he’d lost across three hard years. Vox Pterous takes those same structures and does something riskier than a remix or a reissue: it hands each instrumental over to a different vocalist and asks them to sing inside a space built for someone who’s already gone. The pairings aren’t random. “Resting of Light” traces back to Hardy Fox of The Residents, a friend from McDonald’s earlier days running the DIY label Vaccination Records, and giving that piece to Carla Kihlstedt, whose own career runs through Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Tom Waits’ band, keeps the song inside the same experimental Bay Area lineage Fox belonged to. “Fading,” the track that unlocked the whole project, went to Sophia James, whose grandfather Chuck Wackerman was McDonald’s own high school jazz teacher, a connection that turns her performance into something closer to a family favor than a guest feature.
The minimalist bones of Pterous are still audible under all six vocal performances, and “Anchors Up” makes that clearest. The lyric loops the same handful of images, circles, rewinding, playing it back from the top, in a structure that mirrors phase-shifting minimalism at the level of the words themselves rather than just the guitar layers underneath them. Amelie Anna, who appears on three of the six tracks, sings that repetition without ever making it feel static, letting small variations accumulate the way McDonald’s original guitar phrases did.
“Aviator Eyes,” carried by Paula Frazer and Girl Swallows Nightingale, turns that same patience toward isolation, a figure hiding in a secret garden while hawks circle overhead, “no one came to find me” landing as the song’s quietest gut punch against all that pastoral wind-chime imagery. “The Things He Could Bury” pushes further into that same territory, a song about failed communication built on painter’s language, colors mixed and buried under turpentine stains, and a direct echo of Stevie Smith’s “not waving but drowning” that reframes the whole album’s near-constant water and flight imagery as two sides of the same struggle to be understood.
By the time “Fading” closes the record, James’ voice carries wedding-tattoo imagery dissolving through rain and bone, “learning to fly over veils stretching wide,” a literal enactment of the album’s title, Pterous meaning “with wings” in Latin. Where “Anchors Up” opened the record stuck in a loop, “Fading” ends it mid-flight, unresolved in a way that feels earned rather than incomplete.
What makes Vox Pterous work as songwriting rather than just a clever reworking is how little the vocal melodies fight the instrumental architecture underneath them. Lily Bloom and Daria Novo bring “She’s The Sky” its warmest, most communal imagery: teapots and golden hour and friends laughing in a gallery, proof the album can hold lightness without breaking its own rules, even as the lyric quietly drops the album’s own title into its final lines. Across six tracks, McDonald never repeats a pairing exactly, which keeps the record from settling into a single mood even as its guitar-orchestra foundation stays constant underneath every voice built on top of it.
McDonald has spent a career scoring games and VR films where restraint has to serve someone else’s story first, work that’s earned him a shelf of Game Audio Network Guild Awards and credits running from Counter-Strike to Stranger Things VR. Here, for six songs, the story is his own. He’s found five different rooms full of borrowed voices willing to help him finish saying it, and the fact that so many of those voices trace back to real friendships and real teachers rather than a casting call is what keeps Vox Pterous from ever feeling like an exercise.
Vox Pterous is available now on Appearing Records.
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