“The 99th Day,” the first song from Andy Daps’s new album Small Virtues, starts off with a driving beat and a fuzzed-out guitar. But Daps’s vocal is even-tempered, almost serene. “It happened on the 99th day / At the time it was surely a sign / Recurring ordeal / Battle scar, surreal,” he sings. As he hits the chorus, instead of an electric guitar, a sitar takes the lead, making way for a break involving tabla and flute. It’s the kind of musical left turn that you don’t see coming but brings all the more satisfaction for the surprise. It’s also a proper opener to an album that’s filled with similar musical moments — smart, unexpected, and totally accessible.
The musical life of Andy Daps — a.k.a. Andrew Dapkin — has revolved around New Haven. His grandfather owned and operated Runbaken Engraving, a printing and engraving shop on Orange Street. He grew up in North Haven and started making music as an adolescent, studying with various New Haven-area musicians. He has played gigs around town for years and taught out of a few New Haven music shops, and today teaches music at Foote and Hopkins.
Daps.
As he has developed a reputation as a stellar player, he has also quietly released three previous albums, 2008’s Jazz Prototype, 2009’s Rough Draft, and 2013’s Laments and Lullabies. Small Virtues thus has the easy confidence of an established musician, beginning with the fact that Daps sings and plays most of the instruments on the album: guitars, bass, keyboards, piano, and glockenspiel. But he also finds willing and able support from Mike Nappi on drums, Marthe Ryerson on backing vocals, Brian Anderson on upright bass, Erik Elligers on tenor sax, Scott Packham on synths and organ, Tim Walsh on percussion, Marie Williams on flute, and Matt Wilson on pedal steel. Together it adds up to an album that moves easily through an expansive sound partaking of indie rock and folk while still sounding like a cohesive whole.
“Divinity of Three” combines a rich, intimate sound and a pleasantly knotty harmonic structure to keep the ear engaged and pleased, especially thanks to Daps’s understated lead guitar playing. “A Predawn Kind” has a lush arrangement built on layers of instrumentation that gets positively orchestral by its conclusion, with Daps’s and Ryerson’s vocals serving as guides through it all. “One and the Same” finds Daps and crew at their heaviest, thanks to distorted guitars and oscillating organ, though even that song gets a moment of solitude in the middle. “For a Time” moves easily from texture to musical texture, driven by Nappi’s drums and visits from piano and pedal steel.
The album closes, fittingly, with the album’s most musically adventurous song, “Go On Without Me,” which features the return of the sitar and a wistful saxophone, but is truly buoyed by Daps’s lush, layered guitars. They create an atmosphere of sadness and strength, as of a past pain recalled from a more serene present that accepts what’s happened, but also accepts that it’s okay not to feel okay. It’s an emotional conclusion to a compellingly elliptical album that leads the listener down a road and then makes a gesture toward places farther on the horizon. “Go on without me,” Daps sings, but with music this interesting, why would we want to?