***"Please don’t call Aaron Troyer a 'journeyman.' His songwriting does seem to exist in a sort of static transience and his catalog is quite prolific, but instead of harping on his own autobiography, he seems to inhabit an imagined world of characters who have their own collection of memories and reflections—especially on his latest opus, Shatter the Fantasy, the seventh album under his own name. Like his visual art, the songs on Shatter the Fantasy project as stained-glass abstractions, slightly dusted, full of colors that seem muted but tend to peek through when appropriate. Of course it would be false to say that the album is a departure. You can still hear the sharp punk angles and prickly pop that defined his last fifteen years of work, either in his first band, Day Creeper, or on my personal favorite of Troyer’s solo triumphs, 2016’s Faith in the Unknown. After moving to Austin in 2020, Troyer was driven to make a full-band effort and enlisted Caleb Harmon to play drums and Matthew Collechi to play bass. Not long after, Dusty White (a Columbus wizard and friend of Troyer) grabbed a second guitar and brought his infinite gear wisdom to the band and into the studio to complement this batch of songs, along with Collechi, an experienced engineer in his own right. Though the quartet only played one solitary show together, the dynamism that was tracked on Shatter the Fantasy is nothing short of prismatic, worn and weathered in the best way...
MC $6.00
TBD