Sometimes you and your musical alter ego need a change of scenery. Jasper Leach certainly did. A multi-talented songwriter, musician, and recording engineer, he relocated from the San Francisco Bay Area to New York City in 2019. He was fresh off of recording and playing with a number of bands, including that of pop savant Tony Molina, and had called curtains on the Bay-based lineup of Burner Herzog, his solo project and a stage persona he describes as “an androgynous medium priest character of sorts... sort of like Alice Cooper, but less twisted.” But after the strain of moving across the country and the amount of work he had put into helping his friends write, record, and play live, Leach wasn’t sure what he had left in the tank. It’d been over a year since he’d written a new song.

On his way into his first day of work in New York, Leach bought a reissue of Gene Clark's misunderstood classic No Other as a reward to himself for landing the job. He then experienced what he describes as a "funny and really weird kismet moment” as he walked into work: his new coworker, Nick Freundlich, was at that very moment listening to the same album Leach had just purchased. They became friends and it wasn't long before Freundlich, a bass player, expressed interest in playing music together as well.

Drummer Mike Vattuone, another Bay Area transplant and old friend already living in New York, had played music with Jasper on and off for almost 18 years, and was also down to give it another whirl, as was guitarist Sam Weiss, longtime friend and former member of The Fresh & Onlys and Sonny and the Sunsets. The four musicians quickly clicked, musically and personally, and Herzog burned anew. For the first time with the Burner Herzog project, which already had two largely self-recorded albums under its belt, Leach penned new songs that he envisioned being played by a specific group of people.

As was the case for so many bands everywhere, the global pandemic got in the way of playing together. Lockdown suspended Burner Herzog’s activity after about half of what would become their third and newest album, Random Person, had been written and rehearsed. Unlike many people, this hiatus ended up being a creatively fertile time for Leach. He finally had a lot of time to stare (productively) into space and catch up on books and music he’d been meaning to check out – and new songs kept pouring out of him. The pie-in-the-sky idea of recording these new tracks in person with his new band was what he most looked forward to once the COVID situation improved.

Once the band reconvened and whipped the material into shape, they entered the studio with legendary engineer/producer Martin Bisi at his long-running BC Studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The studio boasts two unique ambient spaces and has played host to a number of great bands over the years, including such New York legends (and Herzog favorites) as Sonic Youth and Swans. Leach remembers with a chuckle trying to record vocals and having to turn away from a painting of the cover of Sonic Youth’s EVOL that was hanging on the wall near the microphone. Bisi observed that the band seemed to really listen to and genuinely like one another, and were so well-practiced that at one point they managed the rare feat of knocking out over ten radically different takes of a single song.
Going into the studio they had vague aims of making a “clean grunge record.” It didn’t unfold in quite that way – “distortion pedals were clicked” after all, as Leach points out. What they did put together is something he describes as “kind of spooky, a throwback to some of the stuff that we all really love,” including guilty alt-rock pleasures like Weezer and Marcy’s Playground.

Herzog are a bit tricky to label musically. Vattuone likens them to bands like the Byrds or the Glands who work idiosyncratically in the underground idiom where indie meets country-rock, with little regard for what’s cool at the moment. Leach cites The Gun Club’s last three albums as a major influence on the record, which may be a bit hard to hear at first but can certainly be felt in the desolate, pedal-steel inflected urban country-rock of “Memo to Persephone” and the intense self-reflection found throughout the record, particularly in the album’s second half. Some songs jump out right away but others, like “Memo” and “Pure of Heart,” sneak up on you, rewarding repeat listens handsomely.

The order of the songs on the album more or less reflects the order that they were written. "Lucky Girl," the last song Leach wrote before moving to New York, kicks things off with an over-the-top urgency and a yearning, Elvis Costello-esque lead vocal, as well as falsetto backing vocals from Vattuone, aided by a bottle of mezcal. The following track, “Sometimes It’s Hard to Break Free,” slyly stacks up literary and lyrical references, some slightly misremembered, on nearly every line, building up to a hook that sticks pleasantly in the craw. Also featured is a stirring and effervescent cover of Yoko Ono’s “Nobody Sees Me Like You Do.” A slice of longing pop romanticism, it neatly fits in among the record’s mix of lyrical introspection and arch humor.

The chiseled playing and songwriting is paired with inspired cacophony, ranging from found sound to an assortment of percussion, including the metal pipes and stairs in the studio. At one point Vattuone recorded an unusual layer of musique concrete for the album’s title track. “I was sitting there on the ground like a little kid with all of my toys around me, with my headphones on,” describes Vattuone, “waiting for the part that is kind of like J.J. Cale’s ‘Cocaine,’ and then... 'OK, cool, grab the nails, move that around, hit this thing with the hammer.'" Bisi’s matter-of-fact recollection was that “it was kind of throwing shit around... like, actually throwing stuff around the room." The ambiance on the recording matched Leach’s vision for the song, written while walking through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in the middle of the night. “It’s sort of about letting go of what you feel are parts of your identity,” he says, “and trying to enjoy that, finding transcendence in it.” The track also features snippets of sound recorded on his phone, including a New York AM radio station whose signal was so broken and digitally warped for a couple of weeks that it reminded Leach of a Steve Reich piece.

Alison Niedbalski, a holdover from the Bay Area lineup who’s appeared on every prior Herzog record, added vocals and keyboards during a visit to New York, once they started overdubs. Session musician Jon “Catfish” DeLorme (Cut Worms, The Nude Party) appears on the record as well, playing pedal steel guitar, as does trombonist Peter Zummo, perhaps best known for his work with the legendary Arthur Russell.

Looking at the album more generally Leach describes how he tries to use “the language of the unconscious” as he writes songs. “I think that’s where a lot of the work for us as human beings is,” he says. “The stray thoughts, the odd monologue that’s private and deep to you, and certainly the things you see and hear in your dreams – I try to bring that element to it.” He does exactly that, particularly on “Metric Halo,” which closes the record with a knockout punch. The title comes from a piece of recording software, but the lyrics wax philosophical about the very act of recording music in the face of mortality or, more immediately, the record’s runout groove. At first Leach thought of the song as sort of a joke, but with the support of the band, swept by the “ineffable feeling” Vattuone described upon first hearing the tune, it ends up feeling much deeper than that, rousing and even cathartic.

Random Person feels like Leach’s finest work yet and an excellent showcase for a versatile band that deserves to be heard far and wide. It’s increasingly rare to hear a new great indie-rock style album – most people simply can’t write great songs, let alone encompass the complex range of emotion on display here. “Everything we do has an element of melodrama to it and an element of humor to it, because I don’t really know how to do it any other way,” says Leach. “The Greeks would put on Oedipus Rex but there would also be an absurd comedy the same night. I think that one kind of has to approach things that way.”

-Mike Harkin