The Party

Most of us have been to the kind of crowded house parties where you hang back and people-watch in relative anonymity. If you were to document it all from afar, who might you see? What might you overhear? On his new album The Party, Andy Shauf puts himself in that exact position, as he crafts a series of connected vignettes that offer up tiny observations from a single night. Throughout the record's 10 songs, Shauf sings with a wallflower's remove and knowing specificity.

The recurring characters the Saskatchewan songwriter and multi-instrumentalist renders are rough but familiar approximations of people he knows: There's a dude who awkwardly shows up before anyone else ("Early To The Party"), a person who admits buried truths that blur the line between friendship and attraction ("To You"), a woman who dances by herself without fear ("Eyes Of Them All"), and a guy who collapses and dies after swearing off smoking. "Alexander wondered why no life flashed before his eyes... why he found no peace of mind," Shauf sings grimly in "Alexander All Alone," amid a steady tick-tock plinking of piano.