ML Buch’s Suntub sounds like an album you’ve always known

ML Buch’s 2023 album, Suntub, feels like a road tripper’s ultimate companion. Its strummed guitar echoes with enough reverb to swallow you with every note as you ruminate on whatever lyric the Danish songwriter throws into the ether. On the meditative “Flames Shards Goo,” a song fit for drives down endless highways, she sings, “Here we go with our temporary bodies,” and her muted delivery sounds like bittersweet acceptance.

Suntub is defined by its dreamy gloss and loping verses, and it recalls Joni Mitchell’s 1976 folk-jazz classic, Hejira, to a striking degree while providing an entirely different emotional experience. While Mitchell communicates the process of discovery through lyrics that sound like one question unfurling into another, Buch is unconcerned with thorny internal struggles; her declarations could easily be sung with a sigh. She offers a hug to the world-weary on album closer “Working It Out,” whose musical repetition and narrow dynamic range telegraph a sense of collective exhaustion. On “River Mouth,” she hints at romantic gestures while couching the care she can provide her partner in an unglamorous metaphor—she describes herself as a “warm puddle.”

On 2020’s Skinned, Buch sang about lurking social-media profiles and being a “girl you can hold IRL.” Four years later, she positions the songs on Suntub in the real world, where they can convey the ways the digital climate has irrevocably changed our lives. It also includes instrumentals that provide necessary reprieve from the tracks whose lyrics weigh heavy. “Slide” sounds like an Americana-based take on experimental guitar shredders such as Henry Kaiser and Hans Reichel, then introduces synths that drip with a digital sheen; “Dust Beam” is little more than straightforward guitar strumming, yet feels like sitting on your porch after a long day; and “Whoosh” twinkles with flickering guitar notes that seem as if they’re in constant search of resolution. Even “Somewhere,” which sounds like stock music for corporate videos, proves unexpectedly soothing. Suntub is often comforting like that, pulling you into the strangeness of contemporary existence and letting you embrace it all.

ML Buch Dorothy Carlos opens. Wed 11/12, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $30, $45 front-of-hall seating, $270 opera box (seats six), 17+