Exploring Echolyn's "TimeSilentRadio" Twin Albums

Thank you for spending part of your day with Michael’s Record Collection. I have to admit that there is far too much music out there for me to sample everything before it comes out or even shortly after it does. I do, however, get around to the important stuff sooner or later.

For example, when Echolyn released two TimeSilentRadio albums in March, I completely missed it. I’m making up for lost time now, because this is some of the best material the band has ever recorded. I was fortunate recently to catch up with the entire band to discuss these albums, which deserve a wider audience.

Let’s get to that story.

I first became familiar with the band Echolyn by way of their excellent 1995 release, As the World. In addition to that one, I was quite fond of their 2005 album, The End is Beautiful. However, I have to admit I lost track of them shortly before I stopped doing my internet radio show in early 2014, and I had completely missed two of their albums that came out after my show ended, finding out about them long after they were out.

Somehow, I had also missed out on their March release of two new albums, TimeSilentRadio II and TimeSilentRadio vii. These twin albums entered my radar when the band put out a video for the song “On We Blur” just weeks ago, and I’m glad they did. It’s been a joy catching up with two albums’ worth of new, original material from the band — the group’s first new music in a decade.

Echolyn’s lineup still includes original members Brett Kull (guitars, lead and backing vocals), Christopher Buzby (keyboards, backing vocals), and Raymond Weston (bass, lead and backing vocals), along with Jordan Perlson (drums and percussion), who has worked with the band as far back as 2000’s Cowboy Poems Free.

The newest two albums also welcome back Glenn Rosenstein, who produced As the World 30 years ago. Rosenstein mixed and mastered the two TimeSilentRadio records, and they sound fantastic.

Across each album, the band has put together about 45 minutes of new music, but each stands alone as its own statement, while tied closely to its “twin.” The numbers aren’t arbitrary. TimeSilentRadio II consists of two epic tracks, while TimeSilentRadio vii contains seven more normal-length songs, ranging from four and a half minutes to eight and a half minutes in length. The capitalization of II and lowercase presentation of vii represent the major second and minor seventh chords, which are unusual, and, as Buzby said, Echolyn prides itself in using inventive and unusual chords.

Kull also pointed out that both are prime numbers. So, as with most decisions, Echolyn plays with ideas that can be interpreted in various ways. Even TimeSilentRadio is sometimes written out without spaces and sometimes incorporates them between the three words in various materials from the band.

The title TimeSilentRadio relates both to words in the track titles (“Time Has No Place,” “Silent Years,” and “Radio Waves”) but also the lyrical themes of the two albums.

“A lot of the lyrics are related to our perception of time and also the way to present music, which now has changed,” Kull said. “When we all grew up, it was radio and now that’s gone. The fact that that medium has sort of faded into obscurity almost is a good representation of how time changes. And ‘silent’ is a really interesting thing in just how the sounds that we listen to — sometimes they go away and then sometimes they come back again. So, it all sort of works together. And those kinds of concepts are inculcated in the lyrics that we have for these two albums.”

“I have a cool poster on my wall in my classroom that says, ‘The same six letters that spell LISTEN also spell SILENT,’” said Buzby, a music teacher. “And I love reminding my students of that fact, because obviously that’s a skill that we as humans need to grow into, but for us as musicians, it means something too.”

As for the music on these albums, well, it’s difficult to describe a band like Echolyn. Aside from the Beatles, you don’t necessarily hear a lot of their influences in obvious ways. The music is small-p progressive, but aside from the long-form songs, it isn’t necessarily big-p Prog. It’s melodic as hell, leans on inventive vocal arrangements with killer harmonies, and marries simple concepts to more complex ones to create something fresh and exciting. It’s rock music with standout — but not showoff — playing. Everything serves the song, and it’s enough that the technicality is in there without having the songs be all about it.

Let’s start with the album with the songs of more normal run times, TimeSilentRadio vii.

“Radio Waves” opens the album with a vocal cutting through a static-like noise intro and quickly becomes a gorgeous voicing over acoustic guitar with some piano. After the first few verses, there’s a section starting with “Wherever you are” that features some of Echolyn’s classic vocal interplay, a little reminiscent of “Lovesick Morning” from The End is Beautiful (2005), as harmonized vocal words and phrases fly in over and around the main vocal melody. The vocal arrangement of “Radio Waves” shines and it’s an upbeat-sounding way to open the album.

The shortest song on either of the two TimeSilentRadio releases is “Silent Years,” at just four and a half minutes. There’s a cool piano/guitar duet going on as the two instruments pick out the same melody, followed by one of Echolyn’s patented lushly layered vocal passages. Perlson’s drumming in the latter stages of this song is one of his best moments on the two albums.

Just a couple of songs in, and the listener will see how important acoustic instruments are to these songs, which contrasts to a lot of progressive rock, which either takes a pastoral approach (often via 12-string acoustic guitar) or goes full-on organ/mellotron/electric guitar. Echolyn takes a more organic approach. Sometimes acoustic guitar and piano work together on the TimeSilentRadio albums, while other times you’ll hear an electric guitar and a piano or an acoustic guitar and a synthesizer working together. Part of that is because the songs were largely written on acoustic guitar and piano, Buzby said. But there’s also more to it than that.

“Although we’ve always written our songs that way, I think we were more wed this time to keeping that original stamp and sound,” Buzby said. “So, for this album, the fact that these guys (Kull and Weston) were often coming down to my place in southern Delaware, all I had in my piano room was an upright piano. They’d lug in a bass and a guitar. We’d write the songs, set up a flip camera, and record them. That was the demo, so to speak.”

What came out the other end is a terrific album with lots of space, plenty of sonic textures, and a unique atmosphere.

“Cul De Sacs and Tunnels” is a beautiful seven-minute track that might be my favorite track on TimeSilentRadio vii. Once again, the band’s vocal arrangements are lush and gorgeous. There’s a subtle vocal echo that provides oodles of extra atmosphere. It’s one of the most beautiful songs Echolyn has recorded, featuring a background keyboard line from Buzby that I find mesmerizing. Weston’s bass groove in the middle section of the song is smooth and joyful. Both here and throughout the album, the acoustic guitar work from Kull is exquisite, and the production is immaculate.

Another seven-minute track follows, as “Boulders and Hills” provides the heaviest music of the album yet, with a bit more crunch than its predecessors. Rosenstein adds cowbell and Katie Barbato guests on backing vocals on this harder track. Even the vocals are a bit grittier on this song. It’s got an angry tone to it.

You have taken everything
You have cost me everything

“Our Brilliant Next” features jazzy piano from Buzby and intense vocals that cross a broad range of tones from hushed dreaminess to angst-fueled rage. You get the full range of emotion in this song, but the real treat for me is this lyrical passage:

Sorry my love I’ve fallen
I’m sick with regret for everything I’ve wasted
Blame it all on our numbered days
Blame it all on morning rain
But I’ve kept us from our brilliant next

“On We Blur” is one of the album’s single releases, and if “Cul De Sacs and Tunnels” isn’t my favorite track from TimeSilentRadio vii, then this one is. It’s one of the more accessible songs in the Echolyn catalog, but it’s certainly not mainstream, despite being melodic as hell. I like the way the keyboard interacts with the piano throughout the track, providing texture.

“I had a bunch of stuff written about an old job where I worked, and it just felt natural to get that out first for me,” Weston said about the “On We Blur” lyrics. “Some of the other songs I would get stuck in parts. Like in ‘Cul de Sacs and Tunnels,’ I got stuck in the middle. I asked Brett, you know, you have anything that you can put into this? And boom, he sent me over some stuff, and it just fit the old melody. And it’s magic.”

Closing track “Tiny Star” is another standout track, giving TimeSilentRadio vii a strong one-two punch at the end. It’s another melodic track and the longest on the album at eight and a half minutes. Weston’s bass shines on this song and plays well off the piano in the verses.

Kull has some tasty electric guitar work prior to the slower “How am I supposed to be someplace” section, which serves as a transition from the first half of the song to the back half. Barbato chips in a beautiful backing vocal part and we get more of Echolyn’s trademark layered vocal arrangements before an eerie, droning transition with doubled vocals and some off-kilter sounds reminiscent of “The Waiting Room” by Genesis (while sounding nothing like that song). That section gives way to an instrumental bit with Weston’s tasty bass and a nice solo from Kull. Perlson’s drums sound great in this section as well.

But Echolyn didn’t stop at one album this time out. There’s an entire other album, consisting of just two tracks, but it by no means cheats the listener.

“Time Has No Place” kicks off TimeSilentRadio II with 16 and a half minutes of Echolyn bliss. The track is divided into four sections and each has its own title. This is in contrast with the second of the two epics on the album, “Water in Our Hands,” which is made up of Parts 1-6.

The first part of “Time Has No Place” is called “Into the Blue and Green” and introduces the listener to the track’s title in the lyrics. “The Air of Ivy Hill” is a gentler second section to the epic. “Emerald Garden” brings back the track’s title multiple times, and displays some of the poetic lyrics that Echolyn uses.

A hundred million shimmering photons
Bounce across the waves
Calling from some emerald garden
Where time has no place

The second mention of “where time has no place” ushers out the “Emerald Garden” part and leads into the heavier “Forever Anymore” section. If the above sounds like an oversimplification of a song that lasts over 16 minutes, it is. I’m still discovering new things each time I listen to both epics on TimeSilentRadio II, and while it seems reviewers online like the second one best, so far I’m leaning toward “Time Has No Place,” although both are fine songs and the best individual section of the two epics might be the final section of “Water in Our Hands,” which has so much emotional gravitas.

“Water in Our Hands” is the huge epic on the two releases, clocking in at nearly 29 minutes long. That’s not long compared to the title track of Mei, the band’s 2002 album, which is nearly an hour and is the only song on the record. But “Water in Our Hands” is a fantastic journey.

For me, this is a song that required repeated listens to fully absorb and appreciate, and as mentioned above, there are still subtle things that I find on each listen that I never noticed before. A good chunk of it is slower or mid-tempo, leading up to a dramatic bass-driven section just past the 10-minute mark in Part 3. There are half-spoken/half-sung lyrics reminiscent of something Sylvan has done in the past but sounding nothing like the German band. This section also revisits the phrase “on we blur.”

“What is that, when you think about you, and time, and the blurriness, like, you know, what does that even make you feel like? That’s what we’re trying to say,” Kull said. “Hopefully, it ties into something for you, personally. I think Ray and I both, we’re not trying to be ambiguous with stuff (as lyricists). We’re just trying to connect with people without telling them (explicitly).”

“A lot of humans, for some reason, specifically with songs and lyrics, we feel the need to know what the person (who wrote the lyrics) meant,” Perlson pointed out. “Whereas, you know, we’re happy to argue over the tone of the Mona Lisa for centuries, and we’re happy to argue about the last scene of Taxi Driver, and we’re happy to argue over the kitchen scene in Goodfellas. So, I think it’s like all my favorite songs. I have no clue what they mean, but they mean a lot to me.”

I find that I waffle between wanting to know what certain songs mean and being fine with the ambiguity in others. The latter is true of Echolyn, and I’m delighted with the care they take to fit phrases and words together in ways that resonate with me emotionally, even if I have no idea what they’re specifically trying to say. I love good wordplay, and Weston and Kull are great at it.

Part 4 is hypnotic and layered. A surround sound version of this section would be mindblowing. Even without the benefit of 3D audio, it’s a great headphones listen. The instrumental transition into Part 5 is one of my favorite moments in the song, rising into a crescendo before settling back into the vocal parts. It’s a mostly up-tempo section of the song.

Part 6 opens after the music from Part 5 slows, and it starts with beautiful piano from Buzby and one of my favorite lyrical passages across the two albums, leading up to the recital of the song’s title.

Wake up, wake up, no heavy eyes
Everything hurts sometimes
If you know how to care

Some will say we’re lost in losing our minds
Dancing waltzes in wide skirts
Your world of consequence
Spun so close to mine
Oh, holy hell
This place has crossed some infernal line

Spinning in our towers and revolutionary halls
As everyone cries and dies
At sixty-seven thousand miles per hour
We drink the same worried fate
And spill against our broken present state

It’s water in our hands

It’s breathtakingly poetic stuff from a band that has long excelled lyrically, right through the final contradictory verse about both everything and nothing lasting forever. I don’t know exactly what it means, but Kull said his and Weston’s lyrics are always personal, otherwise they wouldn’t be authentic. They don’t always explicitly tell the listener what they mean, but there are hints, and the emotional heft of the vocal delivery of the lyric offers more clues.

Overall, this epic seems to be another that discusses time, which is obviously very much like water in our hands, as it tends to slip right through and escape our grasp. Life is fleeting. Our time on the planet is finite. And that’s true for all of us, regardless of whatever we’re going through. I’m not trying to paraphrase Echolyn here; I’m just trying to relate to them, I guess. But I digress…

The overall experience of listening to TimeSilentRadio II is a bit more melancholy than that of TimeSilentRadio vii, but these two records together will take the listener on a journey through a myriad of emotions, and that’s part of the enjoyment of the journey. I can hardly imagine listening to only one of them in a sitting, unless there simply isn’t a good 91 minutes to spend on them as a set. But the order I listen to them depends on my mood.

Echolyn fans of old will not likely be disappointed with these albums. I can’t specifically recommend them to the average prog rock fan, but I can recommend them to fans of melodic rock that skews a bit more complex and ambiguous. Those who like vibes and feel and imagery will likely enjoy these albums more than those who want lots of widdly keyboards or a memorable chorus they can sing along with, but there’s plenty to like for both types of listener.

These albums will be among my favorites of 2025 and I can tell that I will revisit them often.

The two TimeSilentRadio albums are available now digitally and on CD and can be purchased on the band’s official website. It can also be sampled and purchased digitally from Echolyn’s bandcamp site: echolyn.bandcamp.com. Unfortunately, Kull said that because “Water in Our Hands” is 28 minutes long, a vinyl version is unlikely, as that would require an edit, cutting the song into two parts, or lowering the sound quality of the vinyl to fit it on one side.

TimeSilentRadio vii Tracklist:

1. Radio Waves (7:01)

2. Silent Years (4:31)

3. Cul De Sacs and Tunnels (7:09)

4. Boulders on Hills (6:53)

5. Our Brilliant Next (5:47)

6. On We Blur (5:41)

7. Tiny Star (8:29)

TimeSilentRadio II Tracklist:

1. Time Has No Place (16:37)

2. Water In Our Hands (28:51)

For more information on Echolyn, check out the band’s official website at echolyn.com. You can also follow the band on Facebook (@echolyn) and Instagram (@echolynband).

For my full interview with Echolyn, check out the video below or download/stream Episode 164 of the Michael’s Record Collection podcast. In addition to the new album, the four musicians discussed their influences, the band’s origin story, their approach to writing and recording, the band’s views on being “progressive” more than “prog,” Jordan’s approach to drumming, and much more. The quotes in the story above do not do our conversation justice. It was a real give-and-take chat that went to some philosophical places in terms of music, and it was an enjoyable time getting into things. It was a real treat to talk to all four members of the band and having them be able to respond to each other on a given question or topic.

Thanks again for your time. Please consider sharing this issue of the newsletter with the music lovers in your life via the first button below, or sharing Michael’s Record Collection (in general) with the second. And be sure to check out the podcast version of MRC at your favorite podcast dispensary. I invite you to visit my website at michaelsrecordcollection.com and to take a look at the membership levels on my Patreon site at patreon.com/michaelsrecordcollection to find out how you can support independent writing and podcasting for as little as $2 per month.

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