Local Review: Port Ross — Nighttime at Gardner Hall

Port Ross
Nighttime At Gardner Hall
McMurdo Sound
Street: 12.05.2025
Port Ross = Mac DeMarco + Bonnie “Prince” Billy

Nighttime At Gardner Hall is the musical vision of Brooklyn-based and Utah-born Jack Sperry. Port Ross is a real place — a natural harbor housing a cluster of subantarctic islands offshore from Auckland, New Zealand. A spot with a history of shipwrecks, castaway huts were placed on the islands to shelter survivors until they were rescued. After days of Google searches, Port Ross became the name of Sperry’s electronic, indie folk musical project. Everyone lives on lonely islands and every song on Nighttime At Gardner Hall provides castaway huts to find shelter from the storm.

Port Ross: Nighttime at Gardner Hall Review

Sperry’s music is airy, light and delightful like foam sitting pleasantly and inviting at the top of a favorite coffee shop coffee cup. Nighttime At Gardner Hall is a stripped-down record —lush and breezy, with a scattershot of instruments swirling around every track. Sperry uses borrowed, Craigslist-purchased and gifted instruments, including a banana yellow upright piano and bargain bin synths to round out the edges. Sperry speaks with plenty of existential dread on this record, but the instrumentals hold it all together like a warm blanket on a Sunday morning.

Instrumentation and Sonic Textures in Nighttime At Gardner Hall

“Dark except your nightlight / I see the outline in the sheets / You are laying with your body turned away from me / Faking sleep,” Sperry sings on “Nightlight,” a song about two people falling away from each other. “What do you want me to do / With the Christmas presents my family keeps giving me / To give to you?” Sperry continues with this theme on the track “Try Hard”: “I will try hard not to know / The Cookie Monster shorts you wore / Thinking I might spend the night.” The staying is always harder than the leaving. “Close your eyes and try to keep / An older version of me / One who always knew what to say / In the silence of the doorway,” he sings.

Lyrical Themes in Port Ross: Love, Loss and Existential Reflection

Meanwhile, the track “For My Young Death” is a somber musing on mortality: “In the last fallen leaves / Let the time go with me / Come to see my memory / I’ll be waiting patiently.” Sperry thinks about death in a bathtub, while somebody else cuts his hair. “She sits me in the bath / The hair rolls off my back / Then we stand and watch it wash away / Swirling around the darkened drain.” Surprisingly, this is a song you can dance to.

Sperry’s music is always connected to a specific time and place, whether it’s a neighborhood park, a church parking lot, a booth at Chuck-O-Rama or playing in the snow at 2 a.m. Sperry’s music and musings float to spaces like an autumn breeze shuffling around scattered leaves in Brooklyn, or the concert hall at the University of Utah that gives the record its name.

Sense of Place: From Gardner Hall to Brooklyn Streets

Sperry sounds like a Charles Dickens character, right up there with Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield. These are characters who throw themselves into the maelstrom of being human with all its complexities, desires and extravagances — all while death walks alongside, waiting patiently. With Nighttime At Gardner Hall, Sperry gives us a record about death, loneliness, loss and being alive in a world that is a constant shipwreck. As Port Ross, Sperry makes sure to leave behind plenty of safe places for everyone hoping for a rescue.

Why Nighttime At Gardner Hall Deserves Repeat Listening

I highly recommend this record. With repeated listening, Nighttime At Gardner Hall will stick to you like a second skin, jingling around in your brain during the best of times and the worst of times this holiday season. Buy two of these records and give one to a friend for Christmas. They will thank you for it. —Russ Holsten

Read more album reviews by Russ Holsten: 
Review: Hotline TNT — Raspberry Moon
Review: Horsegirl — Phonetics On and On