Bill Orcutt hasn't released a solo electric guitar record since 2017's self-titled album, but the eight-year gap doesn't mean he's been idle. Between then and now: improv collaborations, the chopped-and-looped experiments on Fake Estates, the collision of computer and guitar on Music For Four Guitars and How to Rescue Things, the resurrection of Orcutt-as-bandleader with the Bill Orcutt Quartet touring behind Four Guitars, his first work with a proper score courtesy of Shane Parrish. The computer work expanded appreciation for Orcutt-as-composer, the quartet reestablished Orcutt-as-arranger, but Another Perfect Day, recorded at Cafe OTO in East London on November 14, 2023, reacquaints us with something more fundamental: Orcutt-as-solo-performer, wielding his trademark four-string guitar, running the neck rather than shuffling waveforms, blasting through OTO's tattered Fender Twin Reverb rather than a pair of ancient NS-10 monitors.

This performance boomerangs back into the slashing chords and frenzied double-picking of the Harry Pussy years, tossing the gentler melodic glow of recent solo records into the dustbin. This may be Orcutt's most overtly punk-rockist record since Gerty Loves Pussy, his first solo electric LP from a decade ago, an affirmation that Orcutt is above all a lead player—angular runs scaling the heavens, ricocheting back to ground zero before climbing again. Orcutt builds tension with short phrases, repeated with slight variability until it seems like they'll never stop, finally slamming into a fresh line like the dawning valley at the crest of the mountain pass. The technique recalls Derek Bailey's fragmentary approach or Sonny Sharrock's ascensions, but the attack is pure Orcutt, decades of development compressed into explosive runs that refuse to resolve conventionally.

Another Perfect Day functions as something of a solo guitar Nouveau Roman, an exhilarating run through melodic reiteration, impossible crescendos—check out those ecstatic crowd hoots on "For the Drainers"—breaking into a moment rarely found on an Orcutt record: soft, whisper-quiet tracer notes at the end of "A Natural Death." The dynamic range surprises, the willingness to pull back after sustained assault creating space that makes the next eruption land harder. Orcutt has been playing guitar for four-plus decades now, and when he taps his roots, it's a reminder of exactly what was so exciting about his playing in the first place—the refusal to play cleanly, the embrace of distortion as compositional element, the understanding that melody doesn't require prettiness to function. The record returns Orcutt to the immediacy of his earliest work while maintaining the melodic complexity, phrasing, and flow of a player who's spent those decades refining an approach that seemed fully formed from the start but keeps revealing new possibilities.

Recorded by Shaun Crook at Cafe OTO on November 14, 2023, the document captures not just the performance but the room, the audience response, the specific character of that particular amplifier on that particular night. Live recording as historical document, proof that Orcutt's solo electric work remains as vital and uncompromising as it was when he started, perhaps more so now that the technique has calcified into something approaching mastery without sacrificing the rawness that makes it matter.