Chris Portka has named his record The Album Everyone Wants. Which is a bold move. Most people don’t want any album at all. Most people want, I don’t know, a sandwich, or functioning public transit. But Portka is nothing if not audacious, and it fits: this is the most collaborative, ambitious, and frankly bafflingly sincere thing he’s made yet.
Recorded partly in the hallowed halls of Sear Sound in New York and partly in a little Oakland bunker, the album is an 11-track patchwork quilt stitched from four Portka originals and a handful of covers, all of which pull you into a strange headspace where indie rock, pedal steel country, and tripped-out psych swirl together like three people trying to steer the same shopping cart.
The record kicks off with “She Looks So Good Tonight,” which is both the most straightforward love song on the album and also slightly terrifying. “The grace in her eyes is knives to my spine,” Portka sings, which, yeah, is technically romantic but also sounds like a line you’d find carved into a desk in detention. The song is earnest but crooked, and that’s Portka’s whole deal: he gives you beauty, then slips something sharp under the surface.
“Fun in the Summer” is where things start to melt. It’s a driving song, but instead of the breezy freedom of summer anthems, Portka gives us lines like: “the flames are melting the skin off my face / and the love that shines through it.” This isn’t carefree nostalgia; it’s joy on the brink of combustion, like someone set a Beach Boys record on fire and then tried to play it anyway.
Across the record, Portka’s lyrics sketch a universe where the mundane collides with the cosmic. On “Song for Carol,” he writes, “all days are lost, all days are free / we live a perpetual dream.” The sentiment could veer into cliché if it weren’t delivered with the cracked honesty of someone who actually believes it. And in “The Observer,” maybe the album’s emotional centerpiece, he paints himself as a man standing outside of time: “I’m just an observer / the one in the corner.” It’s almost self-deprecating; like he knows he’s a weirdo, but also deeply moving.
That’s what Portka does best: he writes like someone both enthralled by and alienated from his own life. He’s wide-eyed enough to still get floored by the beauty of a sunset or a lover’s gaze, but self-aware enough to immediately trip over the absurdity of trying to put that feeling into words. It’s not irony (he doesn’t have the detachment for that) and it’s not parody (he cares too much). It’s sincerity, but sincerity filtered through a brain that can’t help but get snagged on the weirdness of being alive. A line like “the grace in her eyes is knives to my spine” isn’t reaching for cleverness; it’s the natural way his mind chews up raw feeling and spits it back out, half-beautiful, half-terrifying.
And crucially, this isn’t just Portka strumming in the dark; it’s a full-blown conspiracy. The bass and synths anchor the chaos, the drums keep everything from dissolving into goo, pedal steel sneaks in moments of twangy grace, and then there’s the “beardwail” guitar, which really does sound like a beard screaming into the night. Together they make the record lush, loose, and perpetually one wrong note from collapse. That volatility is the point; it feels alive, unpredictable, more like a late-night séance than a studio session. You don’t listen to this album for precision; you listen because it teeters at the edge of falling apart, and in that fragility, it somehow becomes stronger.
There’s also the covers, spanning from Syd Barrett, Skip Spence, even Tennessee Whiskey. But they don’t function as the “big hits” of the record. They’re more like postcards Portka found on the side of the road and taped into his scrapbook.
And if the covers give you context, the originals are where the emotional weight lives. By the time you hit the closing track “Molly,” you realize the album has pulled off something rare: it’s a collection of songs that feel stitched together from different realities, yet still cohere into one voice.
So is this really “the album everyone wants”? Of course not. Not everyone wants a song where the chorus is basically just “fun in the summer” repeated until it starts to sound like a curse. Not everyone wants to hear someone compare love to being stabbed in the spine. But that’s the joke. And like the best jokes, there’s a truth underneath it.
This is in fact The Album Everyone Wants: messy, collaborative, equal parts heartfelt and absurd. It’s a love letter to music itself; to ballads, to weirdos, to cosmic jokes that land harder than they should. And if you’re the kind of person who finds sincerity more moving when it’s delivered with a cracked smile and a Mellotron drone, then maybe this really is the album you’ve been waiting for.
Stream this on Bandcamp:
cportka.bandcamp.com/album/the-album-everyone-wants
Physical album only on Seek Collective at:
seekcollective.com/products/vinyl-the-album-everyone-wants
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
