Alibi Coast is the first album by Sebastian Blanck – singer, songwriter and accomplished painter.
It is impossible to talk about this recording without repeatedly making the connections between his music and his paintings. Ever since he left an early lineup of Black Dice ten years ago, Sebastian has made his way as a painter in New York City, all the while quietly, almost secretly, writing warm, personal pop songs away from view. That changed in 2007, when Sebastian’s brother Toby died in a drowning accident thousands of miles away. It was also the year that Sebastian’s first son, Hudson, was born.
Toby had talked of starting a label to release Sebastian’s songs. Robbed of his brother and co-conspirator, Sebastian suddenly found a new urgency to writing and recording, a process he likens to being parallel to painting: a single-mindedness bordering on obsession, blending focus and surrender to quiet the external world. Within this private space he crafted a narrative of loss as well as an emotional re-imagining of Toby’s last months, a time he had kept hidden from his family. What were the forces pushing and pulling him away from the life he had and the people he loved? These questions could have been a dialogue never had, but Sebastian was left to re-create it alone.
To borrow from John Berger: “Those who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.” That is the flickering duality of Alibi Coast—it is for Sebastian and his family, the personal and the public.
The songs on Alibi Coast, based in the melodic lessons of the ’60s and ’70s but thoroughly contemporary, came to life with the help of co-producer Jorge Elbrecht (of the band Violens) and four women who sing with Sebastian on six songs: Caroline Polachek (of Chairlift) on “Thunder,” “Answers” and “Alibi Coast”; Becky Stark (of Lavender Diamond) on “Don’t Let the Darkness Gather Me”; Olivia Mori on “Cloud Lining”; and Lia Ices on “Tumbling Skies.” The album was completed with Nicolas Vernhes at the Rare Book Room Studio in 2009 and early 2010.
All of Sebastian’s roles in life — father, husband, brother and son as well as painter and songwriter — come into play on Alibi Coast. In his paintings he’s a great storyteller, crafting scenes of single moments that unfurl into the past and future. Much the same way, Alibi Coast is a record of open-source love songs, a narrative of one or more relationships moving into and through dysfunction, brushstrokes becoming penstrokes and melodies. Even though there are specific experiences within these 12 songs, anyone with a heart will recognize their own hope, yearning and love in every song. There is sadness here, but Alibi Coast is not a sad record; moment to moment and song to song, its emotion, color and shading change, like a precious stone turning over in your hand.
