Laura Kerry
Swan Lake is a ballet that tells a story borrowed from Russian folktales, about a princess who turns into a swan. The music, composed by Tchaikovsky, carries as much or more weight than the choreography in establishing the mood and narrative of a tale that has become ubiquitous.
Swoon Lake is the Brooklyn-based band that adapts its name from the ballet. Ethereal and evocative, the band and its music share more with the work than just part of a title. Throughout their new eponymous EP, their first since last year’s Like Being A Mouth, the band creates an atmosphere in which one can envision fantastical fairy tales unfolding through twirls and leaps. Swoon Lake—a trio comprised of Melodie Stancato, Paul Weintrob, and Lucinda Hearn—describe their music as “ghost folk,” a fitting name for a sound that seems simultaneously rooted in the familiar and eerily strange. The EP carries narratives and structures, but they are disembodied, ghostly.
In Swoon Lake, the band builds a kind of narrative performance in four acts. In the first, “Bloom,” they establish their haunted setting. “When the earth forgets how to decay / And when the ghosts can't remember what to say,” Stancato sings in a lush, beautiful voice, beginning the song like a poetic folktale. Throughout the track, digital and analog voices dip in and out over the sturdy rhythm of a guitar arpeggio. The second song, “Bath,” is a similar mashup of old and new, but the overall effect of the ukulele, swirling electric guitar, synth, and a folk melody is a timeless feel. “Bath” works in distinct images—“limbs adjacent,” “the eyes left vacant,” “intertwined, inhaling vapors”—adding onto the landscape established in “Bloom” while the exact story remains abstract.
The latter half of the EP continues to build toward the overall arc of the album. In “IDK,” a theatrically haunting track propelled by an ominously meandering guitar and Stancato’s voice—here exhibiting an impressively expressive range, from delicate and soft to tough and strong—adds tension to Swoon Lake. The narrative continues to be obscure, but we see glimpses of meaning and feeling. “I don’t know,” the singer repeats several times, then, “Did I become the lady / Whispering won’t you save me?” In “Home,” Swoon Lake provides a half-resolution. Slow, quiet, and more tightly structured than the others, they ask a series of questions (“When you see me you will see the water?”, “Is it dark when I ask you to love me?”) before repeating, “Oh, I just want to go home.” Just as many of the versions of Swan Lake end in tragedy, the song never quite makes it home, cutting out after the start of a final wish, “Oh, I.”
In Swan Lake, a princess transforms into a swan; in Swoon Lake, hands become mouths (“Bloom”), baths becomes oceans (“Bath”), people become unfamiliar to themselves (“IDK”), and folk becomes haunting and ghostly. Through all of these shifts and disorientations, though, the band manages to maintain a cohesive and evocative sense of story and place. Swoon Lake has created the score to a performance we have the pleasure of making up as we listen.