REVIEW: Swoon Lake - Swoon Lake

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.

TRACK REVIEW: Swoon Lake - Bloom

Laura Kerry

A couple measures into the crisp guitar arpeggios and a warm sweep of mellotron, Melodie Stancato’s voice emerges in “Bloom,” carrying strange images with it. “When the earth forgets how to decay / And when the ghosts can't remember what to say,” she sings reflectively, unfurling a poetic landscape in a sometimes-fluid, sometimes-sharp melody whose lines bleed into the next. This is the world of Swoon Lake, the Brooklyn-based trio—Stancato, Paul Weintrob, and Lucinda Hearn—who aptly describe their music as “ghost folk.”

“Bloom,” more than any song on their last EP, Like Being In A Mouth, is ethereal and abstract, guided more by mood and tone than structure. The guitar arpeggio continues through the song, guiding it with a steady rhythm, but the synth underneath lends a dreamy echo as other instrumental voices dip in and out. A guitar woozily wahs, keys step back and forth, and for a short while, quiet percussion lends a faint heartbeat to the otherwise disembodied song. Though hazy, the melody remains clear enough to maintain momentum and coherence. The track muddies a bit when an organ enters in the middle, but it is brief and the song soon darts forward.

Preserving clarity throughout “Bloom” are Stancato’s lush vocals. Just as the instruments drift into ghostly echoes, her voice shifts and slides unexpectedly. Sometimes it's deep and sturdy, soulfully sliding into words; other times, it's as ethereal as the song, wandering up into higher registers where it meets beautiful harmonies. Though the vocals provide no clear path through "Bloom"'s imaginative setting, they serve as welcome companionship for meandering. Swoon Lake has given us a welcome place to get lost in.

REVIEW: Swoon Lake - Like Being in a Mouth

Kelly Kirwan

Swoon Lake has the eerie delicacy of the ballet from which their titular pun sprung—fragility, folklore, and an air of the ethereal drifting calmly through their three-track debut, Like Being in a Mouth. Lead singer Melodie Stancato’s voice is gripping, dipping between low, soulful timbres and high, lilting sopranos, as light traces of melancholy work their way into the “spooky and sensual” fabric that the trio has draped themselves in.

Despite her Brooklyn zip code, Melodie Stancato’s spine-tingling intonation feels like a dainty call of the wild, an alluring lullaby drifting through a dark wood. In fact, there’s a heavy emphasis on the evening and sleep in Swoon Lake’s songs, or at least the in-between state it elicits (swaying between the vague terrain of a dreamworld and consciousness). 

Take "Narcolepsy," a track which refers to the condition by which sleep becomes uncontrollable, seeping into those moments where it doesn’t belong. The song is beautifully unsettling, a simple acoustic guitar petering between haunting vocals, as visions of an “unspoken world” and tears spilled in sleep are painted with Stancato’s pitch. It plays like a fairytale, a story that glistens with a poetry beyond our humdrum day, but has a darker, haunting component lurking somewhere underneath. Deemed “ghost-folk” by the band themselves, Swoon Lake’s sound is stirring and celestial, the kind of uncanny that makes you weak in the knees.