Cafe Racer stays in collaboration with change. 
 “Touchstone” and “Time Killer” chronicle both the intimacy and expansiveness Cafe Racer cultivated during quarantine. For the first time, guitarists Michael Santana, Adam Schubert (ULNA) and Andrew Harper experimented with a free-form, in-studio writing process while engineering their own recording sessions. With nothing but time, anxiety and hope for collective survival, Cafe Racer dropped into themselves, evolving into stunningly nimble conductors of their signature electricity. 
 In “Touchstone,” they slow down enough to make something distinctively gorgeous. Chicago darling and beloved co-conspirator Mia Joy (Fire Talk Records) weaves siren vocals with Santana’s. The drawl of Harper’s modular synth meets the band’s first experiments with drum machines (drummer Elise Poirier layering beats over top), bringing to mind light traveling over a sundial. It’s an enchantingly hypnotic meditation on time and space, on how technology bridges our humanity, and what we discover when we are allowed to step back from the institutions that surround us. 
 To the seemingly open-ended question that is “Touchstone,” “Time Killer” responds with a kind of cathartic energy release. 
 The tracks are either ends of a spectrum reckoning with what this moment has asked of us, and suggesting that the answer might be in our questions. 
 -Prosper Hedges Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.