UnknownComponent

Written by Jacob Martin, Arts & Living Editor   

    Today’s one-man band is a much different musician. Take Keith Lynch, for example. Lynch, who writes and records his own material under the name Unknown Component, labors at home, not in the square. Much of what he does goes unseen, if not unheard. With painstaking care, Lynch layers track upon track—the way a painter layers color on a canvas—until the song in his mind emerges. When he has a collection of songs he likes, he puts out a CD. Since beginning Unknown Component five years ago, Lynch has been busy writing and recording, releasing at least one disc a year.

    On Oct. 14, Lynch loosed his seventh effort, titled “In Direct Communication.” Like the true one-man band that he is, Lynch does it all: he sings and plays electric guitar, bass, keyboard and drums. The astonishing thing is that he does it all so well; there is no hint of amateurishness, despite the fact that Lynch does not have access to the high-end studios where the music industry’s big names record.

    Although the ten songs on “In Direct Communication” are diverse, ranging from straight up rockers (“Identifying Interpretation”) to slower, reflective numbers (“On Your Mind”), they have one thing in common: they are all catchy. Lynch has a strong sense of melody, and his songs stay with the listener long after the last notes fade. After listening to “In Direct Communication” a few times, I found certain songs, such as the opening track, “Into the Sun,” lingering in my head. When music hangs around like that, it can be annoying—everyone knows the irritation caused by a bubblegum pop song that just won’t go away—but not in the case of Lynch’s tunes, which stick without being sticky sweet.

    The main difference between Lynch’s smart-pop and today’s top-40 radio is the lyrical content. While the majority of mainstreamers sing of nothing but relationships gone (or going) bad, Lynch questions the reliability of the information we receive and the difficulty of discerning the truth, the nature of which seems to depend on who happens to be telling it at the moment. In “Into the Sun,” he sings, “Full of doubt, I can hardly tell the difference now, who has won/It’s about the confusion in the messages now, who has won”. Sometimes, his lyrics have the heft of poetry, as in “Somewhere a Light Has Gone Out”: “The coldest courtyard in the east, where gravity is a disease/There’s a road to a boat made of plastic ambition and gold/Someone is tearing you down, somewhere a light has gone out I know”.

    But before Lynch can drift too far into the metaphysical—in his non-musical life, he is a Philosophy major at the University of Iowa who cites Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as influences on his work—his melodies, simple and strong, bring him back to earth.  His voice has an earthy quality, actually; Lynch can sound like Texas troubadour Butch Hancock at times and singer-songwriter Freedy Johnston at others. Like both Hancock and Johnston, Lynch has a gift for penning memorable music that should move him from the realm of unknown to well known—good news for today’s one-man band.