Noah Georgeson

Recorded between 1999 and 2003, while he and Joanna Newsom were holed up together in a dinky San Francisco apartment, Noah Georgeson’s first solo album stands as big-beard acoustica’s suavest document to date. Dude even uses a mellotron—the primitive, tape-based sampling keyboard once favored for orchestral parts by the likes of King Crimson and the Moody Blues—giving the venerable behemoth (it weighs a ton!) new life on opener “Tied to the Mountains.” The classically informed instrumental’s lambent strings, virile winds and timpani swells demand a Hollywood spy movie.

Granted, a sexy, postmodernist Western with time travel and a Mary Magdalene cameo might be a bit more up Georgeson’s trail. The producer (of Newsom as well as Devendra Banhart and Bert Jansch), guitarist, singer and keyboardist consistently balances the mountain-dandy half of his persona with the composition skills he absorbed from the likes of Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Curran while earning an M.A. in music at Mills College. In a clear, bright tenor with just enough bite, the neohumanist hotshot tackles big-picture issues (work versus pleasure, mechanisms of belief, survival) with humor and insight, shuttling among centuries, continents and conceits over arrangements alternately lush and bare, but consistently compelling. — Rod Smith