Playing out like a classic rock singlet that drops on the radio at just the right moment in our day, Christopher Banks’ “Angry Letter” is perhaps the best means of getting a close look inside the mind behind Anxious Attachment, his new album.
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As spellbinding as some of the psychedelic-tinged framework is, it’s got nothing on what the music is doing for us with its wispy rhythm and moaning melody, the latter being the strongest force any listener would be able to tangle with in this mix. There’s nothing particularly brutish about this track, nor “Lateral Romance” or “Coming Up for Air,” but that doesn’t make them any less dangerous in tone or spirit. Like strolling down a dark alley just past the witching hour, there’s no telling what’s waiting to creep out of the shadows and start imparting its sinful soul to us in Anxious Attachment; we’re given one choice and one choice only here, and that is to sit back, relax, and let the craftsmanship of one Christopher Banks serve as our light through the darkness.
There are a plethora of straight-up dirty melodies throughout this record, but some of the crispest of the bunch can be found in “Audrey,” “The Magician,” and the stony “Wherever You Are.” Thanks to the top-notch production style that Banks opted to use in Anxious Attachment, none of the instrumental intricacies ever got in lost in translation here – if anything, they’re magnified by both the lyrical aesthetic and the general approach to the soundboard.
I dig the tension in the first half of the album, especially as it relates to giving the second a little more room to be cathartic and open up to us on a more unguarded level. Tracks like “The Window,” “Lateral Romance” and “For a Limited Time” have a lot of live potential because of their versatile framework, and if they can be properly adapted to suit the needs of a packed concert hall, there’s no reason why this singer shouldn’t ascend the underground hierarchy with relative ease.
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One-part Journey and another The Killers, Christopher Banks unleashes one beast of a new album in Anxious Attachment, and it would surprise me a great deal if I were the only critic remarking on its substance this March. For this being his first studio album in this capacity, the swagger that this young man is injecting all of his music with is something to behold. He’s not quite as arrogant as some of the egomaniacal pop songwriters I’ve come across in 2023 have been, but for the audience he’s looking to satisfy, he’s exactly the right combination of confident and humble as far as it would appear here.
Anxious Attachment doesn’t waste any of its rather moderate running time trying to convince us that its starring player is anything other than a soft-spoken commentator with a knack for making a sexy melody here and there, but in reality, this man is developing something every alternative buff should be paying attention to this year.
Chadwick Easton