Mighty Vertebrate

Anna Butterss is caught between two worlds—or three, or four. The dream of a life in jazz lured them from Australia to the U.S., but they soon became one of the most in-demand bassists in a raft of other genres, working with indie darlings Andrew Bird and Jenny Lewis, stalwart singer-songwriters Jason Isbell and Aimee Mann, and rock star Phoebe Bridgers. (A touring gig with the latter earned them a spot on Bridgers’ acclaimed Punisher and Boygenius’ Grammy-winning The Record.) But even as their profile rises elsewhere, Butterss has stayed adamantly rooted in Los Angeles’ jazz community. Moonlighting on cramped stages and in small back rooms, they’ve helped to foment a small-scale revolution documented on albums like Jeff Parker’s modern classic Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy and SML’s Small Medium Large. On top of all this, Butterss now has to look after a solo career.

Butterss’ first solo album, 2022’s Activities, was a product of circumstance made after Colorfield Records’ Pete Min invited them to experiment with a range of instruments—most of which were not bass—during one feverish day in the studio. For Mighty Vertebrate, they’ve taken the opposite approach by carefully composing every part before recording note one. This was a new process for Butterss, but they found familiarity in friendly faces: saxophonist Josh Johnson and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann are bandmates in SML, while drummer and producer Ben Lumsdaine has been a collaborator since they were both teenagers. “They’re going to understand what this is supposed to feel like,” reasoned Butterss. “We’re not going to have to talk about it much.” Indeed, years of improvising together meant that the band knew exactly what Butterss expected—not traditional jazz, but a jazz-inflected melange of styles, from lo-fi hip-hop to slow-burn post-rock.

Butterss set themself a discrete objective for each track, crafting a homemade version of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. One such task was to “make a song that uses groups of three-bar phrasing,” resulting in album opener “Bishop.” The track runs on an undeniable low-end groove rounded out with pearlescent guitar and new-age synths until the bottom, quite literally, drops out. A seaside field recording makes for a serene bridge; then the band jumps in again on a dime, immediately locking in with redoubled energy. Butterss’ group exhibits the same breathtaking exactitude across the record, adapting itself to each genre like a full cast of method actors.

To finish another goal (“sample something and make it into a song”) Butterss grabbed dialogue from the Mexican dramedy La Casa de Las Flores: “La homosexualidad no es una enfermedad. La homofobia, sí… Desafortunadamente para ustedes la estupidez no tiene cura.” (“Homosexuality is not an illness, but homophobia is… Unfortunately for you, stupidity has no cure.”) The dark, driving “Breadrich” grows out of this impassioned speech, further emphasizing its point with intimidating slabs of bass and dissonant keyboards. This is a rare and welcome moment in which the group’s—and the L.A. jazz scene’s—implicit politics become explicit, when the ultra-technical veneer peels away to reveal righteous, but never quite unbridled, anger.

We can imagine what other prompts may have guided Butterss through the making of Mighty Vertebrate. For “Lubbock,” perhaps, write a post-rock song that evokes the grand, arid landscape of West Texas. For “Ella,” soundtrack a gentle rainstorm. For “Dance Steve,” just let guest guitarist Parker shred. Each task is completed hyper-competently if dispassionately, creating a catalog of feats by a band that can seemingly do anything, remarkable in scope but lacking in focus. Mighty Vertebrate proves that Butterss can thrive in whatever world they find themself in. Now they just have to choose which one to conquer.