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Having the strut to match the swagger of your melody is essential in the opening cut of a record like Stephen Chopek’s Dweller, and he rightly puts a confident piece in “All Play No Work” to serve in this capacity. The trend in and outside of his scene this year has favored a lot of self-awareness that verges on self-centeredness when it’s not facilitated in the right manner, but somehow Chopek manages to factor in a lot of soul-searching in songs like this one and “Start Over” without sounding like he’s breaking down the story of his life page by page. There’s nothing self-righteous nor inaccessibly insular in Dweller, but instead a collection of six songs that tell us a little more about the more thoughtful side this rocker has been hiding from us in his last two records.
WEBSITE: https://www.stephenchopek.com/
“Empty Hands” has the bite of an 80s post-punker, but its decadent cosmetics prevent its lyricism from sounding deliberately scathing. There’s no shortage of honesty and multi-interpretive poetry on this disc, but it’s coupled with such a diverse cast of tones and textures on the backend and front of the mix that none of the commentary ever sounds like ranting. Chopek’s sincerity can be felt as much in the way he phrases the lyrics in this record as it can in the way he sings into the microphone, often with an intimacy that recalls some of my favorite artists in the retro alternative lexicon. He wears his influences on his sleeve, but it’s part of the identity he’s crafting around these songs.
“My Fault” and “We Still Know” each have a breezy rhythm that left me swaying long after the music stopped, but their radio appeal doesn’t sound intentionally plasticized nor developed just for the sake of scoring some streams online and on the dial. There’s never an instance where Chopek sounds like he’s trying to establish an aesthetic or even a beat that doesn’t have a direct partner within the lyrics he’s crooning, and while this leads the groove to lurch towards us in “We Still Know” rather intimidatingly, it feels like just the kind of heartfelt performance that we don’t get from some of the biggest names in pop music nowadays.
APPLE MUSIC: https://music.apple.com/us/album/dweller-ep/1574207936
Dweller concludes on a lusty tune in “Unspoken Hopes” that pushes the sonic parameters of the preceding five tracks well beyond the limits I thought Chopek had as a studio player, but if this is a more genuine depiction of how far he can take things, I’m definitely game for more. I wasn’t so much a fan of Stephen Chopek as I was an observer before getting into Dweller ahead of its August 6th release, but its six songs make his place as a rising star in the American underground difficult to argue against, especially this season. He’s sounding more mature than anyone else living in the same critical conversations as he is, and based on what he’s able to get off of his chest in this EP, I can’t wait to hear what his next full-length is going to consist of.
by Vincent Nemeth
