B-Side Guys

Vinyl Williams built an app that translates the position of the planets into musical pitch, called Musical Astrology, and it tells you something about how literally this artist means it when a lyric on “Soulgaze” says “become the sun.”

The song’s other lyrics keep pace with that logic. An arrow moving through the stars, rainbows harnessed out of the sky, an origin that levitates through its own metamorphosis, none of it reads as loose cosmic flavor once you know where it’s coming from. This is someone who has assigned actual pitches to actual planets. When “Soulgaze” reaches for celestial imagery, it’s drawing from the same worldview that runs the rest of his catalog, nine albums deep into building out a universe he treats as more discovered than invented.

That reach gets pulled back toward earth by the actual influences on record. Williams has pointed to Marvin Gaye’s I Want You and organist Ronnie Foster, mid-70s soul records built around physical longing, and brought in afro-harpist Nailah Hunter for ambient texture underneath it all. A harp is already halfway to heaven as an instrument; paired with a Marvin Gaye reference, it splits the difference between a body and a sky.

The title splits the difference too, shoegaze fuzz and soul warmth compressed into one word, and the record makes good on both halves at once. It’s the kind of quietly sensual, unhurried track built for the “sexy, chill” tags it’s filed under, a fitting warmup for the double LP Williams has coming, one lo-fi half and one hi-fi half, gatefold and all.