Cam Butler: Solar
Kasumuen Records

While a recurring selling-point of Cam Butler's music is the distinctive twang of his electric guitar, his ninth solo album Solar shows its appeal extends far beyond a single element. The Melbourne-based Butler's also a strong composer and arranger who's not averse to dressing his music in elaborate orchestral form, though never so much that the result flirts with pretension. In drawing upon more than twenty-five years of playing and recording, he makes the craft of music-making look easy, even if creating Solar had to have involved its fair share of production challenges.

Augmenting a guitar trio core of Butler, drummer Mark Dawson, and double bassist Miranda Hill is a fourteen-piece string orchestra, with a string quartet, double bassist Rosie Westbrook, electric bassist Any Papadopoulos, and timpanist Arwen Johnston also contributing to selected tracks. Bolstering the almost symphonic sweep of the instrumental presentation is a technique commonly used by classical composers, the use of a main motif that recurs in different form to connect the dots between its eight parts. This not only helps unify the album, it also gives Solar the feel of an adventurous and scenic travelogue.

Setting the tone and re-establishing Butler's trademark, electric guitar is the first sound one hears on the album. Emerging from a dusty intro, the trio gives the ear-catching, somewhat Morricone-styled theme its first voicing on “Solar (The Beginning),” imbuing it with infectious swing as it does so. A second theme drives the subsequent track, “Cold Summer,” with shrieking strings viciously laying into the grinding melody and drums and timpani adding a primal thrust to the performance. The music thereafter advances through brooding, strings-drenched episodes and anthemic, rhythm-driven expressions, all of them personalized by Butler's melodic sensibility. However far the music travels, there's always the rapier thrust of his tremolo-laden guitar holding it together. The motif introduced on the opening track receives a thorough going-over in the penultimate title track, at nine minutes the most in-depth examination the theme receives. Alternating between string-drenched moments and others featuring the guitar trio, the music segues from an arrestingly funky episode to one where a melody echoes the “A denial” refrain from Nirvana's “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

The word cinematic is overused, but it applies here when the musical canvas is so bold. It doesn't surprise, then, to learn that Bulter's music has appeared on Australian and French television and that he recently scored two short films that premiered at the Sydney Film Festival. Genres blend and collapse on Solar with seeming ease, Butler in one part tearing through a track as part of the guitar trio and in another roaring alongside the string orchestra. If the music exudes power and dynamism, that's to be expected from a project whose title carries it with associations with the sun, energy, and solar power.

September 2022