Daniel Blumberg - On&On (LP) - Clear Vinyl

Daniel Blumberg has been on an intriguing path since stepping away from indie rock outfits like Cajun Dance Party and Yuck, and On&On is the point where that path feels fully his. Released on Mute on 1 May 2020, the record folds tender songcraft into a live-wire improvising language drawn from London’s experimental scene. It is the kind of album that seems to breathe in the room with you, patient and searching, then suddenly cutting right to the bone.

Blumberg’s core circle is key to that feeling. Violinist Billy Steiger and double bassist Tom Wheatley give the music grain and tension, while Yoni Silver’s clarinet and other reeds smear lines around the edges. The group developed much of its rapport at Café OTO, and you can hear that lineage in the way the players listen, leave space, then push. Producer Peter Walsh, known for his work with Scott Walker, returns here and captures it with a clarity that never sands off the risk. He lets the air and scrape sit alongside Blumberg’s voice, so the songs feel both composed and precarious, always in the act of becoming.

The title track is the mission statement. It circles a few simple motifs but refuses to resolve, as if Blumberg is testing how long feeling can be held without snapping. His voice creaks and rises, harmonica squalls into the frame, the strings fray, and the rhythm is more pulse than groove. It is restless, yet strangely intimate, like a diary being written in real time. “Sidestep,” a standout that trailed the album, tightens the frame a bit. There is a steady piano figure that makes room for Steiger’s bowed lines to catch and glow, and Blumberg’s phrasing keeps slipping just behind the beat. You get the sense of someone trying to say the precise thing and circling until the right words appear.

What makes On&On stick is how it treats the song as a living object, not a thing to be polished and fixed. Blumberg’s writing is plainspoken and raw, and he lets the band tug at its edges. When the clarinet curls around a phrase or the bass growls from below, the lyric opens wider. It is not improvisation for its own sake. The pushes and pulls aim the emotion rather than distracting from it. You can trace a line back to his 2018 solo debut, Minus, but this one is looser in the joints and more confident about leaving seams visible.

Critics heard that clarity. The Guardian and Pitchfork both singled out the way Blumberg sustains intensity without grand gestures, and The Quietus dug into the record’s drift between composition and chance. Around the same time, Blumberg’s film score work began to bloom, including his acclaimed music for The World to Come, which makes sense. He has a knack for holding a mood and letting small details carry weight. On&On often feels cinematic in that way, shots lingering on faces and hands rather than on spectacle.

If you are the sort of listener who hunts for detail, the vinyl edition pays off. The strings sound more tactile, breaths and bow scrapes bloom, and the dynamic range opens up the slow builds. On&On vinyl is one of those pressings that rewards a quiet room and good speakers. It is also a neat gateway into the small ecosystem around these sessions. If you are scrolling a late night shop page to buy Daniel Blumberg records online, or flipping through a Melbourne record store bin while scanning listings for vinyl records Australia, this is the one you pull first, then you keep going back for Minus and the film work. Daniel Blumberg albums on vinyl tend to feel like artifacts, not just formats, because the music depends on air and movement, and the medium answers in kind.

So, yes, it is a singer songwriter record, but not in the tidy sense. It is closer to a document of a conversation between a writer and a group of fearless players, one that keeps looping until a truth emerges. That is the charm here. Nothing about On&On strains for significance, yet the feelings land hard. If you are curious about where song meets the unknown, this is a record to live with. And if you collect Daniel Blumberg vinyl, it is an essential spine on the shelf, the one you file under the letter O because it never really ends.