After more than ten years of touring and secluded home recording, Stephen Steinbrink has catalogued several albums worth of gorgeous melody, quotidian dread and desert blight in his stark, minimal pop. Yet the songs on his latest record Anagrams, beautiful yet unflinching portraits of addiction and mental illness are captured in his most meticulous and high-fidelity production to date. While one might expect the record to be a final destination, a tidy hi-res culmination of all this journeying, the album’s particularly varied styles and sincere lyrical uncertainty portray a search that still continues.
