The self-titled debut from Fulton Lights, brainchild of Brooklyn NY’s Andrew Spencer Goldman (John Guilt, Maestro Echoplex), is a big-sounding but hazy-feeling slow-burner of a record very much the product of the city it calls home. New York’s manic and sublime energy —sometimes majestic, sometimes claustrophobic, often both—radiates throughout these forty-four minutes of music that took over three years to create. The album achieves an unusual feat: Fulton Lights subtly rumbles, roars, screeches and buzzes while retaining melody and structure and leaving room for Goldman’s expressive voice and elemental piano/organ/guitar parts.

Goldman’s first move was to team up with similarly broad-minded Oktopus (aka Alap Momin) of the noisy hip-hop group dälek, who helped with the initial tracking of several songs and co-produced “Thank God for the Evening News,” one of the album’s standouts with its sampled beats, papery vocals, ghostly strings, and muted horn blasts. After completing a demo with Momin in early 2004, Goldman took Fulton Lights back to the lab to map out the rest of the album. He then assembled a frighteningly talented group of friends who have played and/or recorded with Wilco, The Walkmen, Tony Conrad, Beth Orton, Jon Langford, Ida, Aloha, Demander, The Hold Steady, among others, and two outstanding producers/engineers: noisemakers extraordinaire Steve Silverstein of Christmas Decorations (Community Library Records, Kranky Records), and Rob Christiansen (East Ghost West Ghost, Sisterhood of Convoluted Thinkers, Eggs). Both Silverstein and Christiansen helped to record the album, to contribute essential performances, and, most importantly, to act as sounding boards on the long road to the finish line. Goldman also turned to Still, former DJ of dälek, to help co-produce the ominous album intro and the dark and intense “1,000 Little Eyes,” built on dense and disorienting layers (and layers, and layers) of processed samples and a single repeated guitar chord.

The end result is an album sonically vast but surprisingly subtle—both lyrically and musically. Many of the songs on Fulton Lights have big, RZA-and-DJ Krush-influenced minimalist hip-hop beats (that old reliable boom-bap, none of this newfangled IDM-influenced stuff), lush string arrangements that hint at John Cale or Isaac Hayes, piano and organ, beds of noise, upright bass, vibraphone, and guitars, all sitting nicely behind Goldman’s tinted vocals. All told, it's a hell of a lot more varied, nuanced, and noisy then his earlier work with folky outfits John Guilt and Maestro Echoplex, and in its experimental attitude Fulton Lights is a closer spiritual sibling to contemporary bands like Califone, TV on the Radio, and Grizzly Bear. But as with the best work of those bands, Fulton Lights still recognizes the importance of making the song come first.