ARTVERTISEMENT is the enigmatic follow up to Darrin Bradbury's 2019 release TALKING DOGS AND ATOM BOMBS. That album had Kenneth Pattengale from The Milk Carton Kids at the helm but this time Bradbury has gone alone on that facet. However the result is along the same lines of an album dropping into your vicinity souding quite like no other and drawing you into the web of an artist provoking an element of curiosity to their work. The rapid fire of nearly a dozen tracks peppering your senses in little under half an hour is repeated with the same effect of straining your mental sinews to pop down the channel the artist is leading you to.
Listening to ARTVERTISEMENT many times continues to draw comparisons with Micah Schnabel. Both are idiosyncratic and fuse poetic folk with punk sensibilities to subscribe to a singer-songwriter set housed within the broadening boundaries of Americana. To actually try to dissect and understand all the lyrical subtleties submerged within a brief span of thirty minutes is for the brave only, so maybe the best bet is to kick back and let Bradbury do all the work. A job he does with cutting excellence.
The three tracks that peerlessly poke through from this set of twelve in the standard edition enhanced by a bonus one in some formats are the seriously superb opener 'Field Notes From a College Town', the curiously wonderful 'Exile on Myrtle Beach' and the delightfully catchy '15 Shovels'.
Elsewhere, the calmer waters of 'XXY Top Left' are welcome after the furious two-minute punk thrash of 'Artvertisement', while spoken parts intermingle with song on 'Shiny Town' and the quirkiness peaks with 'Deanna Deanna'. As indicated, you are asked to lend your ear to the delights of this record for half an hour, which is probably the optimum time once our man gets on a roll.
Darrin Bradbury continues to make interesting music spiced with a few nuggets and gems. ARTVERTISEMENT has plenty to say, plenty to decipher and plenty to give from an album brimming with rhythmic prose.