Westerman

Westerman shares his final offering "A Lens Turning" from his sophomore album An Inbuilt Fault, out this Friday via Partisan and Play It Again Sam. Accompanied by a music video directed and animated by Edwin Burdis, the visuals perfectly capture the song with a seemingly metaphysical character morphing to each musical shift. Through the use of color and movement, the video mirrors the song's ups and downs while maintaining an eerie atmosphere that reflects its ominous themes of self doubt. The new track follows previously released singles "Take," "CSI: Petralona" and "Idol; RE-run," the latter which Pitchfork noted, "lingers deceptively far past its fade out."

 

Additionally, Westerman has announced a European tour starting in October and going into mid-November. The tour is stopping in 26 cities including London, Paris, Copenhagen, and Milan. The European run will follow his first North American tour in four years that starts this week with stops including Seattle, Chicago, New York, Washington, DC, Austin, and Los Angeles. Tickets for the European tour will go on sale this Friday May 5th here and you can find full tour routing below.

 

An Inbuilt Fault encapsulates some of the most adventurous and unselfconscious songwriting of Westerman's career with music that is heavier and more sonically daring than Westerman’s previous releases. While first working solo through a period of isolation in Italy in 2020 and 2021, a chance meeting with Big Thief’s James Krivchenia at a show in London changed this. Westerman decided to take a leap of faith and collaborate with the drummer and an extended crew of Los Angeles associates to flesh out his new songs. The Italy demos became jumpoff points for jams which, in imaginatively edited forms, pushed the songs into new affective realms; sometimes, the mood became more sinister, sometimes more triumphant. Throughout the album, Westerman abstracts his specific points of inspiration into invented scenes featuring multiple characters (sometimes distinguished with vocal effects or alternate vocal ranges) and allows his most broad-strokes universal sentiments to dominate the foreground. The result is Westerman’s own mini-epic about being in crisis, stitched together from torn song fragments and spontaneous moments of musical exorcism, which combine to tell a story that takes clearer shape with repeated listens.

 

02.05.2023