Autumn + Colour Records

It begins with a sound, a simple noise creeping through a headset. Bryan Taylor becomes obsessed with the tone, putting it on a loop. Beats and melodies are pillars on a computer screen, rising and falling, eight and sixteen bar phrases utilized as texture. The pattern emerging is the map to follow, each rhythm a new course to embark on. Before all this there was feedback, and guitars smashed and flung in front of audiences, there was two years of The Chariot.

He spent ten months on the road each year. As a guitarist Taylor provided his architecture of melody to the discordant chaos of The Chariot, but he spent what moments he could on tour crafting a very different sound. “I wanted to be doing my own music,” Taylor explains, “something weird and trippy.” In 2009 he recorded his first album as Slowriter, What Keeps Me Sane.

The songs were infectiously catchy and strikingly quirky. Taylor quickly gained praises for his idiosyncratic melding of acoustic guitars and billowing soundscapes. By 2011 he released a self-titled follow-up EP. Hip hop’s all-devouring sonics had weaved their way into the program beats, creating a barrier of harmony that quelled the psychedelic wall that could have easily emerged in the most grandiose songs.

Trailblazer is an album of mile-markers, each song it’s own winding path in a forest both beautiful and haunting. For some songs the epitome is of the brightest hope, the music flourishing in a glow of ethereal sounds, in others solitude is met by a manic concoction of electro-pop. This dichotomy of joy and isolation is just a series of points in a journey. There’s no cascading clarity that comes from a journey completed to be found on Trailblazer, just the oddity of existence and the staring gaze of what marked the past.