Scree’s new release, “Live at the Owl Music Parlor Volume Two,” follows on last year’s excellent album, “Jasmine on a Night in July.” The trio—Ryan El-Solh on guitar, Carmen Quill on bass, and Jason Burger on drums—recorded the songs live over two sets in early 2024 at the Owl Music Parlor in Brooklyn. This mini-album, like SML’s “Small Medium Large,” Tom Skinner’s “Voices of Bishara Live at Mu,” and Jeff Parker’s “Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy,” captures an insanely inventive band at a locked-in moment; three people thriving on the chemistry they share and playing wild, beautiful music. There are concerts you go to where you recognize that something special is happening, where the band produces wave after wave of ecstatic sounds—“Live at the Owl Music Parlor Volume Two” is a lot like that.
“Chestnut” opens with El-Solh’s delicate guitar playing and Quill’s bass quickly enters too, with some rattles from Burger. El-Solh’s guitar tone is both somehow familiar and unplaceable—it reminds me a little of something you’d hear on early Constellation records or maybe an early 2000s Kranky release. Around the minute mark, there’s some big strums from El-Solh, and then the band shifts into a little shuffle and it sounds amazing. A statement opener that shows off everything they’re capable of in the space of two and a half minutes.
One of the most impressive things about this band is that they’re always in motion—there’s barely any repetition in their songs, like they’re making an infinite unscrolling song that they snip into listenable portions. You can really hear this on “Exclamation Point,” which goes straight in, drums, guitar, bass, all lurching slowly into a jazzier little jam. El-Solh switches to a riff around 40 seconds that they successfully poke around for a minute, then a couple big chords again signal another switch, this time into a loungey phase, where Quill’s bass playing is really up front. Another minute and El-Solh plays harmonics to usher in another phase, throughout which he rips off several incredible passages on guitar (the end of this track is extremely pretty). Every track is like this, melodic invention, totally fluid playing, all combining to make coherent, alluring songs.
“Being Realistic,” among the contenders for best track on the album, starts real slow, with Burger’s measured percussion, Quill’s very intermittent bass, and some languid playing from El-Solh. Lots of space (this is another one that sounds, to my ears, like it could sit comfortably on an early 2000s post-rock album), also staggeringly beautiful, the way it moves and evolves. Around a minute in, they pick up the pace a bit, with El-Solh looping out these phrases that get bigger and bigger, casting further and further out. Around two minutes into “Being Realistic” is one of the biggest moments on the album, only surpassed by what happens at the end of the song, when they really, thrillingly let loose.
“Nocturne with Fire,” the last song on the album, highlights all the things that Scree does well: there’s a slow, gorgeous build in the beginning with El-Solh (mostly) solo, scribbles and drafts, lightly penciled little eye-catching structures that rise and fade, and then Burger’s drums come in around 2:30 (and Quill, who I think is bowing her bass on this one), and it steadily grows to a more turbulent section around the 4:20 mark, with some stormy percussion from Burger, and then an even higher level plateau around the 5 minute mark, at which point the band shifts into a jazzier groove, led by El-Solh’s guitar. The rest of this song is all three of them going for it full speed, weaving, intertwining, in motion.