PORTLAND GUITARIST Marisa Anderson’s newest full-length, Into the Light, sounds like one long ride into the sunset—a journey that gradually but magnetically moves toward the horizon.
It’s no wonder Anderson’s album bears this cinematic quality; a press release says it was created to soundtrack an imagined sci-fi western featuring “a visitor lost and wandering on the shifting borderlands of the Sonoran Desert.” Its 10 songs are vignettes that bleed into each other like watercolor landscapes, swelling and sighing with the energy of living, breathing beings.
Anderson’s sci-fi western is vividly illustrated with warm layers of lap and pedal steel that whinny with nostalgic resonance and twang—at different points in the album these guitar parts sound like they’re being distorted through echoing canyons or calling without response across expansive, empty plains. Her unspoken story sounds almost post-apocalyptic, as if her desert traveler were searching for signs of life in a woebegone land.