By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring the imaginative and inspiring ambience of Kirin McElwain’s YOUTH, out now via AKP Recordings, and the crushingly soulful lo-fi folk of Emily Hines’ THESE DAYS, out now via Keeled Scales!
Kirin McElwain – YOUTH
Genre: Ambient, Electroacoustic
Favorite Tracks: “Closer,” “Genius,” “Desiderata”
Ones and zeroes meet organic tissue on cellist Kirin McElwain’s debut album, YOUTH. Composed between Brooklyn and Stockholm over a two-year period, the disparity of those places mirrors the sonic palette. Strings such as cello, viola, and hulldorophone are fragmented, sound-bursting spiccatos as feedbacking, modulating noise rounds out the textural compositions. With McElwain’s voice also entering the fore to utter confessional poetry, YOUTH displays the wonder of different artistic disciplines markedly coalescing into an inspiring work.
McElwain has explored these elements across her output, so the dissimilarity between acoustic and electronic sounds is more complementary than dissonant. Their conscious packaging as her formal full-length debut suggests some greater significance, despite its brief runtime. Still, McElwain traverses varied ground over these seven tracks. The brooding introduction “Comhartha” is like stepping into a monolithic woodland, an image conjured by bellowing drones and anxious strings. The title track carries a lighter serenity from McElwain’s ethereal vocal harmonisations.
The middle portion’s seamless three-track run is the strongest section: Whirring synths sporadically twist their shape (“Closer”) into something eerie (“Genius”) and later into a propulsive techno pulse (“Desiderata”). The longest track “Softer, Still” plays with structure, where its beatless first half is chilling is given form by the low-slung, ringing feedback concluding the oblique improvisation. Closing dirge “Pony” contains nothing but ominous sub-bass until “Comhartha”’s acoustic strings re-emerge, looping back to the beginning and framing the album as never-ending.
What can be gathered from this interpretation is that doubts in life don’t necessarily disappear entirely: rather, they come and go. McElwain’s music explores notions of desire and shame, so considering this and the connotations of youth, the record beholds a profound dimension. It’s McElwain’s marrying of harsh noise and crisp cello that reveals her unbound from apprehension, asserting her deft artistry. Listen to this deep meditation on Bandcamp. [Dom Lepore]
Emily Hines – THESE DAYS
Genre: Lo-Fi Folk, Americana
Favorite Tracks: “My Own Way,” “Cold Case,” “Cedar On The River”
The longer you sit with her music as the burgeoning days begin, the more Emily Hines’ songwriting quietly folds in on itself. The slow moving clock of earlier dusks and darker nights ticks further down, matching the devastating heartbreak that clouds each and every song on her debut, THESE DAYS—a seven song affair with romance, self-preservation, and the constantly eroding world around us.
Released in August, but spiritually a late October album, THESE DAYS sounds like fall. Recorded to cassette from a “tiny house in South Nashville,” on each track Hines and producer Henry Park capture a spiralling melancholic malaise—passionate yet uneasy, intimate yet distant, prescient yet timeless. While plenty of midwest singer-songwriters have traveled to Tennessee to capture longing and sadness over the years, THESE DAYS musically strikes a stirring balance between lo-fi looping and live performance, almost every song an over four minute poignant battle with herself and the world that crackles and hisses the further into the darkness we’re willing to drift.
The production is guttingly direct; flourishes of strings and drum pads amplify the stripped back guitars and vocals, while the hushed static of those tapes bind everything together with a cathartic emptiness. Oscillating from the personal to the universal, the gentle march of the snare on “My Own Way” and the whimsically freeing metronome beneath “UFO” give way quickly to Hines’ bravely delivered poetry—the former a personal exploration of her own shame, the latter a cheeky plea for cosmic liberation writ large. The album’s best track, “Cold Case,” somehow finds a boundless middle ground between those ideas, a cry of romantic agony wrapped up in a hard hitting mystery. “Why is it so hard / to understand the truth,” she softly cries out, as though the songs themselves aren’t meant to answer just that. You can fall under THESE DAYS pensive spell over on Bandcamp. [CJ Simonson]
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