SAM PREKOP - Who’s Your New Professor

Chicago 2018… It's gonna change.

Indeed, quite a few things have changed since the days of that magical American season, when post-rock was the linchpin of every new creative explosion.

Talking about Sam Prekop, it's hard not to mention that compilation, a tribute to the city that cradled the avant-garde scenes of the Nineties, since it's precisely in that double homage to the schizophrenic American underground community (Clearspot, 1999) that we find, among others, the seeds that have carried Prekop and other survivors all the way to the present day.

"Post-rock", the magic formula that, like "new wave" in the previous decade, encompasses everything and its opposite.

In that same cradle we find, busy trading composite moods, Tortoise, the ever-present Jim O'Rourke, hordes of electronics-bastardized jazz musicians, unlikely glam-rockers (Bobby Conn), and finally a none-too-underground army of post…pop acts.

Prekop is the man who, along with John McEntire (a mainstay of Tortoise, as it happens) and Archer Prewitt, put together The Sea And Cake. He's the man who borrows the jazzy tremors of that windy Illinois city — already intoxicated by Latin American pulses (though in the manner of Arto Lindsay) — to carve out light melodies that embrace the lessons of the noble fathers of American pop.

We might even go so far as to say, at the risk of sounding blasphemous (though we don't much care), that Prekop is to The Sea And Cake what Donald Fagen is to Steely Dan.

Just as Fagen the solo artist intoxicated himself with funk, especially on "Kamakiriad", Prekop, without the band, almost entirely sheds the avant-leaning tendencies of that pop project (references that, to be fair, were already becoming rare on "One Bedroom" and which here can only be traced in the muted hypnotism of "C+F"), in favour of a simplified, more orthodox songwriting approach — no less captivating for it.

Six albums with his own band, a second solo outing, a jazzy 1999 debut of disorienting beauty, and a common thread running through them all: a perspective that plunders experimentation and, with languid wonder, hands it back in the form of songs to listen to on roads framed by spring sunsets, or during an intimate after-dinner moment.

Don't expect any epoch-making shifts on this album, since the vibration of these quiet-emotions plays out entirely on the imperceptible, in the search for new aftertastes of melancholy.

What you will find, instead, is an obsessive attention to detail, a kind of songwriting that aims for the mind when it can't manage to strike the heart. And a taste for digression: telling in this regard is "Dot Eye", a track with a gentle opening that discreetly slides into electric roughness recalling even the Talk Talk of "Laughing Stock".

Then there's a moment where Sam plays at being Tortoise playing at being Steely Dan, with the instrumental "Magic Step", which draws straight lines of virtuosity — the kind that carve trenches between ordinary musicians and those who really play.

The flaws of "Who's Your New Professor" are the same ones that mark other Prekop productions, whose preference for form sometimes comes at the expense of substance: here and there lies an underlying mannerism that anyone familiar with the man won't fail to notice, and not for the first time.

So, alongside several successful moments — the dreamy pop of "Something", the arpeggiated folk-inflected homage of "Chicago People", the half-asleep journey of "Density" — we stumble into mere stylistic exercises that feel already heard ("Two Dedications", "Little Bridges", "A Splendid Hollow", and we'll stop there), adding nothing to what this refined exegete of pop has already said.

Venial sins, which nonetheless we cannot help but point out, and which cannot but weigh on the final verdict.

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30/04/2026