REVIEW: Cassandra Jenkins - Play Till You Win

Laura Kerry

“We were singing along / To an old familiar song / When she came waltzing through the door,” sings Cassandra Jenkins on “Tennessee Waltz.” Crooned over a pedal steel sound and a simple, guitar-led chord progression, the song tells a story of love lost to another in a style that borrows heavily from country. It sounds familiar, like an old Americana song that has burrowed deep in the collective consciousness, but as the other tracks on Play Till You Win waltz in, they begin to reflect uncannily on each other. Jenkins’ full-length debut is a balance of old and new—country, indie, and dream pop—so delicate and clever that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Leading the album through this balance are Jenkins’ beautiful and versatile vocals that move through subtle variations on vulnerable (“Shame”), haunting (“Red Lips”), soft (“Hotel Lullaby”), and touches of twang (“Candy Crane”). She has a voice that, like Angel Olsen or Beach House’s Victoria Legrand, can command with quietness. Even as her it dances with cinematic strings, jazzy horns, and wobbly synths, Jenkins’ voice remains in the foreground, ethereal but strong.

For the 11 tracks on Play Till You Win, though, Jenkins credits 21 different people with contributions, and the scale of the effort shows. Assimilating the many instruments used throughout the album into her warm, dreamy sound, the artist plays with a mixture of analog and digital, classic and new. The first half of the album leans old, favoring sparser rock instrumentation in tones and arrangements that establish Jenkins’ version of country, but “Tennessee Waltz,” “Jan Lee Jansen,” “Shame,” and especially “Candy Crane” are not so straightforward; all contain hints of strings or synths that lift them from the earthly genre to the more otherworldly realm of synth and chamber pop.

For the most part, the second half of the album emphasizes that gesture. Synths step further into the mix in “Disappearing” and “Hondas Well,” and in “Hotel Lullaby,” woozy, carnival-like keys lead a dizzyingly good art-pop track. And it is dizzying; as in the rest of the album, it’s hard to know exactly where you are, both sonically and in the narrative of the song. While tracks like “Tennessee Waltz” tend towards understandable narratives, others dip in and out of concrete language and metaphor. In “Hotel Lullaby,” Jenkins establishes a clear image of a hotel room in which someone lies next to her. But the song reveals a dream world on top of the one in the room: “You are nothing but waves / And I break,” she sings.

As with Jenkins’ voice, her writing is simple and powerful enough to carry the listener through any turns. We follow through musings on death in “Jan Lee Jansen,” candy and toys on “Candy Crane,” the psychedelic swell in “Hondas Well,” the heartbreak of failing to see Halley’s comet, and even through the inclusion of charming voicemail from an old man named Richard. And like the impulse in the face of the arcade claw machine in “Candy Crane,” from which Jenkins gets her album title, the only thing to do once you reach the end of Play Till You Win is to try it again.

REVIEW: ohyeahsumi - Your Friends Are Looking For You

Kelly Kirwan

Press play on ohyeahsumi's latest, and you’ll hear a croon that’s plush and whispering, the sort of lightweight pitch that melts its consonants together in an alluring lisp. If you were to ask the two sisters (more specifically, twins) to describe their sound, they’d opt for the enigmatic and noncommittal tag, “velvet bedroom pop (kinda).” Lena and Rena Vernon have voices that could spool burlap into silk, their respective resonances having the smooth roll of a purr.

The duo spent this past winter writing and recording their new EP, Your Friends Are Looking For You, which serves up six tracks of slight discordance and an enrapturing narrative of love in its warped states. Lena and Rena’s voices may be velvety smooth, but their melodies go against the grain, weaving in a rougher touch. It’s our cue to dig beneath the surface of these girls' sweet delivery, because this album is certainly not saccharine. It mingles in darker strokes of reality, and for that, it’s all the more enticing.

The EP’s opener, “Cosmos Bowling,” begins with deep, reverberating guitar strums and harpsichord-like gleams. The Vernon sisters’ high sopranos then flutter and fall into layers over the dreamy landscape, as the ominous lyrics set a different tone, “I hear the good girls die / I hear the bad boys hide.” The song is served by this single verse, a dark rumination, that’s engulfed by versatile strings and tangy notes. The mood lightens somewhat, in terms of melody, as the song meanders towards its end, but it’s still bound to a final thought: “I’d rather stay inside / Pretend to sleep at night.”

The track “Daisy,” in it’s first few seconds, mirrors the full-bodied plucks of “Cosmos Bowling.” But it stays more subdued, their voices hushed. In these murmurs we seem to learn secret thoughts or urges, “Scared of being pretty / Room is dirty, mind is filthy / My dress curves clearly at the waist.” Before we learn how they’re viewed in the eyes of their love interest’s mother, and perhaps how they can assert themselves with mischief (or self-sabotage) with the confession, “I make my drinks bitter and mean / So you’ll puke on her daises, baby / I like my boys bitter and mean.” We see this interplay of two stereotypical vices, lust and spirits, and how, sometimes, we crave the things that leave us with the ache of a hangover, and a little withdrawal. 

Your Friends Are Looking for You is a soft and sharp. It toys with ideas of relationships and the acerbic aftertaste they can bring, even playing with themes of secrecy. The album's title aptly fits its mood, and the unspoken questions it raises: Where have you been? Who were you with?  Ohyeahsumi beguile and unsettle, and they do so beautifully.

PREMIERE: Poppy Patica - Bystander

Kelly Kirwan

The opening to "Bystander" is a series of high-decibel synths, as if we were running our palms across a dashboard of digitized buttons. This latest track off Poppy Patica’s new album, Tripping None, is just a sampling of a genre that’s a spinning wheel of punk, pop, and the experimental. Spearheaded by Peter Hartmann, this independent project has now evolved into a plush, 80s-tinged landscape, with a few cameos from musicians on DC’s indie scene.

This retro electronica that dominates "Bystander"’s opening also serves as the introduction to the entire album. It sets the tone, a little metallic riff that comes to us as pseudo-futuristic. The song then melts into thumping percussion and a jangly ambiance, as if the instruments were swerving off-key, threatening to wane away. Hartmann’s vocals have a slight nasal resonance, floating in a high octave that has subtle hints of a psychedelia. As the song propels onward, his voice takes on a lower, more earnest timbre, and with all the surrounding cacophony it’s a sly feat that his lyrics aren’t lost in the fuzzy, off-pitch surges of guitar and bass.

"Bystander" is a song that thrives off static, as if the plug on the amp were wriggling loose and filling the track’s nooks and crannies with crinkling white noise. If we could trace our fingers along the melody, we may just feel that quick electric shock against our skin, adding a little Einsteinian volume to our hair. It’s an enrapturing case of coloring outside the lines that’s true to Poppy Patica’s style, and only he can pull it off quite so seamlessly. 

PREMIERE: The Washboard Abs - Recurring Chasms

Laura Kerry

The Washboard Abs are much softer than their name suggests. The songwriting project of Clarke Sondermann beginning in 2014, they have moved three cities (from Anchorage to Denver to Olympia, Washington); picked up three members (Angelo Vitello on guitars, Brendan Burton on bass, and Grant Chapman on drums); and perfected their breed of gentle indie folk-rock. After a few releases over the years, including 2015’s Whateverland on Slovakian cassette label Z Tapes, The Washboard Abs are back with Recurring Chasms, their fullest and most beautiful work yet.

Pared-down but meticulous, Recurring Chasms is an intimate album. The Washboard Abs resemble Kings of Convenience with clear, delicate vocals above rhythmic folk guitar-led compositions, but they are more off-kilter; underneath the dulcet melodies sung close to the mic are subtle punctuations of surprise and dissonance. “Erosion” sparkles with warmth as the bass and guitar slide over incongruous notes, “Icy Moon” threatens loss of control with moments of expansive jazz chords, and in “One,” bare lyrics hover over dense, unrestrained fuzz. While wildness threatens at the edges, though, Recurring Chasms remains intimate and largely muted. “I control the narrative,” Sondermann sings in the final song, “Veil,” between instrumental reveries, “I’m bleeding through this song.” Through detailed and sometimes unexpected tracks, the inner workings of the songwriter prevail.

REVIEW: Pile - A Hairshirt of Purpose

Kelly Kirwan

The latest album from Boston’s purveyors of post-punk, Pile, stays true to their boisterous aesthetic. It’s bustling, as if it were recorded in an air compressor tank, the hint of implosion smirking at us throughout its nine tracks. A Hairshirt of Purpose is the band’s fifth LP in a ten-year span, and it’s speckled with elements of other unsuspecting genres.

While Pile has a tendency to gravitate towards a jarring, cut-and-paste style, there’s a certain fluidity to their latest work, a mingling of reflective grunge and full-fledged, noisy hysteria that has more than once been described as “cathartic” across the indie music boards. Frontman Rick Maguire (who handles vocals and supplements the guitars) had noted that A Hairshirt of Purpose grapples with the bliss of solitude, and rumor has it that the blueprint of this album came from his own independent excursion along the Appalachian Trail. The result is a kind of Walden-inspired enlightenment funneled through gritty instrumentals, zig-zagging chords, and fleeting, ruminative respites.

To begin, let’s take a cue from Pile and start with the unexpected: one of their slower songs. "No Bone" is a quick jaunt, with ever-so-slight elements of folk lurking in the twang of a guitar, and Maguire’s croon that lingers and curves at the end of each phrase. It’s an introspective song, unhurried and socially observant, “We can all pick fights and stay indoors / So there must be nothing here to tend to … But I’ll try to be kind,” he sings, as the track wraps at just under two minutes.

At the other end of the spectrum is “Texas,” where that aforementioned catharsis takes hold after reaching its boiling point. It begins with a boom, the slam of a drum as the guitars come reeling in, serpentine in their delivery. It’s full-bodied, and you feel as if you're shoulder-to-shoulder in a dimly-lit venue, knocking into your neighbors with sweat-caked skin and a feeling that any moment you may just break into a headbanging frenzy. “Texas” has no blank spaces, not a single crevice of quiet.

But even in Pile’s more subdued songs, they’re still filled to the brim. The album opener, "Worms," kicks off with a frenetic drumroll that then shifts into a contemplative song, with Maguire’s earnest voice at the forefront, “I would never dream of blaming it on you / So please don’t ask me to stay any longer,” his pitch spiking and falling over every word. That quick, stacked percussion of "Worms" is mirrored in the following song’s first seconds ("Hissing For Peace"), which maintains a heightened, reverb-laden cacophony throughout.

A Hairshirt of Purpose is a mosaic with sharp edges. Pieces of the album are reflective, even soft, and others have a taste for wildness that leads easily to a static-drenched revelry. It’s an all-encompassing trip for us to take, diving in to the album's ups and downs (decibel-wise, that is) for a feeling of sweet release.