Four decades is enough time for a musician to put out a discography the size of a small library, survive a few comebacks, and write a memoir. Over the course of his four decades, Lawrence Kim managed to be a member of BMX Bandits in Glasgow (the very band Kurt Cobain said he’d want to play in), front New York’s The Amber Smith, architect the Brooklyn synth-pop project Scam Avenue, and join Ryn Weaver‘s touring lineup — all while putting off a solo album the entire time.

His biography reads like an extended prelude to something that kept getting postponed, and when Kim himself chalks up the delay to “laziness,” you want to believe him and doubt him simultaneously, because laziness implies inaction, and he was active the whole time — playing, producing, arranging, writing for other people’s voices. More likely it was the inertia of a team player, the habit of dissolving into a group, of being part of a whole. “Us against the world,” as he puts it.

photo by Meredith Truax

The Hours and the Times comprises nine tracks, and Kim insists on a fundamental distinction — being alone and longing for someone are different states, and his album concerns the former. But then you listen to Line and Key — a song featuring Kid Millions of Oneida, carrying that springlike, weightless feeling, with Kim‘s voice sounding so precise and relaxed here — he’s singing to himself in the kitchen, having forgotten to turn off the microphone — and you realize that the line between solitude-as-peace and solitude-as-ache runs thinner on this album than its author may be willing to admit. Line and Key is arguably the best song on the record, and it’s the best precisely because you can hear that irresolution in it.

I find myself thinking about the phenomenon of the late debut and where it sits in indie rock culture. There’s an entire mythology built around early albums — the twenty-year-old genius who recorded a masterpiece on a four-track in a basement — and that mythology fosters the false impression that a debut is supposed to be young, hot-blooded, excessive. Kim made his first solo record with sessions alongside Kim Fowley on Creation Records behind him, years of producing Scam Avenue under his belt, and experience working with people from the Philip Glass Ensemble and Ghost Funk Orchestra. This is the debut of a craftsman, and the craft reveals itself in the way the album breathes, in how it distributes energy and attention. New Jetsetter opens the record gently, with jangly acoustic guitar and Kim‘s calm voice, joined on the chorus by female backing vocals. The track builds gradually, smoothly. Kim says he wrote it after a long creative silence — he simply picked up an acoustic guitar at a friend’s house, and the melody appeared on its own. After that, the rest of the songs came quickly. Anyone who has ever written music knows this feeling: the blockage, the pause, and then one stray chord breaking the dam.

Sawyer slows the tempo, and there’s something mystical in the track — cavernous drums, warm acoustics, an atmosphere that faintly recalls the later recordings of Talk Talk, though stylistically they’re far apart. Then comes Madeleine — acoustic, romantic, with a Beatlesque melodic clarity. Kim calls it one of his favorites. According to MAGNET Magazine, the song’s heroine is a composite of several people Kim knows, someone exhausted by other people who has retreated into a world of books and music. The real world proved too harsh. And here the album’s title surfaces — The Hours and the Times, a life measured as the sum of individual observations and reactions, a Proustian ghost hovering somewhere nearby (the coincidence of the name “Madeleine” with Proust’s madeleine may be accidental, but I prefer to think otherwise).

After these contemplative, almost philosophical tracks — Rodeo. This is where the record gets shaken up. Emma Tricca and Rachel Cox of Oakley Hall arrive as guests and bring an entirely different dynamic. An incendiary thing, a spark punching through the album’s meditative shell. Kim has admitted he’d gone a long time playing electric guitar and used Rodeo to release pent-up rock energy. The song, in his own words, is about a person who chases fame and considers himself a big deal while actually being hollow. The irony of the situation is obvious: Kim, who spent decades in supporting roles, writes about vanity from an observer’s vantage point, from a window through which the absurdity of that race is fully visible.

photo by Meredith Truax

Best Western is a light acoustic folk track, a far cry from country affectations and cowboy spurs in the production. A simple song that does its job and yields to the next one. And the next one — Escape Artist, featuring Rachel Cox — is the most unusual thing on the album: nearly ambient, cinematic, enigmatic, with an atmosphere that could transport you to a screening room at an independent film festival.

Diver is a duet between Kim and Emma Tricca, acoustic guitars and voices, and here is where country appears. A light western flavor, pedal steel (Eoin Russell is credited), and the album acquires yet another shade while the overall fabric remains cohesive. Peter Hess of the Philip Glass Ensemble plays flute on Sawyer, Stephen Chen of Ghost Funk Orchestra contributes saxophone, Dana Lyn plays viola. The entire ensemble of guests operates with subtlety: you sense the presence of other musicians, but the center of gravity always stays with Kim. He is the producer, the songwriter, the arranger — and also the person who decided that a flute solo on Sawyer should close the song, about which Kim says simply: “Love Peter‘s flute solo at the end.” That kind of terseness about one’s own decisions is the mark of someone who trusts the material.

The record does have a vulnerable spot: the album’s middle stretch flows evenly, with several consecutive tracks existing at the same tempo, the same temperature, the same register of quiet pensiveness. Sawyer and Best Western, each beautiful in its own way, end up side by side, and the listener has to pay slightly closer attention to tell one song from another. Then again, Rodeo detonates that evenness with such relish that the album’s structure begins to resemble breathing — a slow inhale, a held breath, and a sharp exhale on the electric guitar.

To me, the chief virtue of The Hours and the Times lies in the stance Kim takes toward his own material. The record lives its own life — warm, melancholic, and self-assured in that quiet way available to people who have already proved everything they needed to prove and are making music for the only remaining reason: because the songs have been written and want to be heard.

Kim says the next album may be recorded with a band. He still loves being in one, after all — “us against the world.” But first he needed to be alone, and The Hours and the Times is the document of that solitude.

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