By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring the stirring electronic textures of feeo’s GOODNESS and the left-field avant-pop compositions of Jules Reidy’s GHOST/SPIRIT!
Jules Reidy – GHOST/SPIRIT
Genre: Experimental, Folktronica, Avant-Pop
Favorite Tracks: “Every Day There’s a Sunset,” “Split The Lights,” “To Breathe Lightning,” “Satellite,” “You Are Everywhere”
For a while now, Jules Reidy has explored identity through avant-garde composition—centering layers of electronics, vocals, and microtonal folk tunings within abstract, sprawling structures. That combination of tones allows Reidy to differentiate themself, where instead of piling upon intense grandeur to immediately hit an emotive high, they emphasize jittery, spontaneous pathways that blur and clear simultaneously. A tangled web of thoughts bumps you on one hand, but guides on the other.
However, GHOST/SPIRIT is a fascinating anomaly, a shift that retains what Reidy has always delivered while still changing route. It is an act of transformation that stands out from the rest of their work, where consideration for track-by-track song structure is ever so prominent. Abstract characteristics are in full view with stern electronics and freewheeling guitar plucks, but they don’t always bleed from one song to another. Beginnings and ends stay within conformed space.
The change in structure can be attributed to Reidy singing even more than ever. Accompanied by slight effects, it complements their considered, yet captivating singing. Immediately stepping in front as “Every Day There’s a Sunset” introduces the project’s sonic effervescence. “I give all to you / Until I disappear / And there is no one left for you to give on back to / Until you disappear,” sings Reidy. The rest of the melody is composed like a mantra, while the atmosphere shudders and shakes with stacks of synths, guitars, and chimes. The abstract and conventional are strung together, crafting something from beyond.
A ray of instrumental samples across various collaborators carries more weight in Reidy’s swirl, intensifying the fractured compositions. “Satellite” keeps shedding its organic textures, sounding like a wave that constantly eats up everything around it. The following track, “To Breathe Lightning,” is simultaneously soothing and imposing. Meditative singing sits around synths, chimes, and drums that keep poking a bubble.
The emphasis of transformation comes through the most in Reidy’s hand at writing—the very first album that they have inserted lyrics into—and how it is a layer that amplifies the strength of going through an evolution in their musicianship. A personal reflection on giving everything of yourself, that you end up losing parts of who you are. It is an exhausting process, but it never shatters Reidy. That sonic abstract maximalism with emotionally grounded detail should be a pairing that could subsume one another, but it never does. It becomes a centerpiece as they immerse themselves in that emotional expanse. As they sing on “Spirits:” “All I have for you / All the love and fear / Two sides of the eternal / Too close to be near”
In letting go comes letting yourself be part of something otherworldly. It’s what Reidy eventually allows themself to go through in the back half of the album. “Spill The Lights” and “You Are Everywhere” best represent this transcendence. The former’s searing synths alongside graceful guitars and vocals make it a white-hot comet that brightens the space it inhabits. The latter’s composed structure finds comfort in the grounded and the mystical. “You’re all I can see / Space only expands to watch you go away from me (light I am receiving with every day receding),” Reidy muses, finding acceptance within what is being lost and what is being found as the guitar is played like it is being splintered and reformed.
After years of forming an abstract, maximalist approach to songcrafting, GHOST/SPIRIT is a refreshing shift for Reidy, allowing them to open personal avenues by singing and writing, aspects that willingly showcase more of their identity, and the emotions that they must wring through and find more understanding at the end of the day. That humanness melds with abstract tones that become considered in their structure and tones, affirming even more of the transformative exploration that Reidy has put into themself. In leaving behind the ghosts that linger, we find our spirits thrive in spaces that we couldn’t imagine, but still feel in the most ravishing of ways. A change worth seeking on Bandcamp. [Louis Pelingen]
feeo – GOODNESS
Genre: Alternative, Electronic, Singer-Songwriter
Favorite Tracks: “Requiem,” “Win!,” “Sandpit,” “Here,” “The Hammer Strikes The Bell”
GOODNESS is an album that stirs within the looping mundanity of a populated city, where the flow of time and events remains infinite. So noisy yet so quiet all at once, to the point that you can isolate in your own headspace amidst the casual chatter and formal work rounds that whir around the modulating activity of that city. Things can become overwhelming just living through it daily, but you can wade through, find meaning within it all.
Within her graceful voice and the sparsely tender soundscapes, feeo encapsulates how it feels to revel within such an encompassing environment, filling the space with varied tones to present the gradual scales of emotions spiraling around the city and the natural space we live in. “Win!” and “Here” are embroidered with minimal synths—and distorted guitar on the latter—that stutter and crash as she sings gorgeously amidst its fractured edges. “Requiem” and “The Hammer Strikes The Bell” are meditative in their tranquil grooves and electronics, allowing her curious poetry to strike: “The hammer strikes the bell / And everyone listens / As someone is talking / And we want to know why it rings”
Amidst that curiosity, the album leads to feeo’s internal search towards connecting with herself and with somebody. The quaint keys of “Sandpit” are an unraveling for her and for someone she wants to be with. “Say it again / I say ‘do you love me’ / I’ve never known my own name” is a simple set of lines that contains more questions than answers. One that she couldn’t exactly answer herself, especially when there is still confusion left in defining who she is in such a world that keeps passing through every day at such a fast pace. Tangled in a city that blurs ever so slightly, where isolation leaves you internally and externally conflicted.
Closer “There is No I” leaves the album on a striking note. Throughout that chilling acoustic backdrop is the realization that clinging to connection allows the darkness to subside partially, enough for the light to pass through feeo’s world with an exhale. Living alone can be challenging; living alongside another person can be life changing. The last lines offer a resolution to this arc: “And you fill me / Just when I thought / I couldn’t be any more full.”
Methodical and minimal yet so evocative all the same, feeo captivatingly walk the lines between immersion and solitary on GOODNESS. Living through spaces that can be overwhelming and isolating, but leave enough gaps to allow her to find herself and find connections that can change her perception along the way. Listen to this moving album on Bandcamp. [Eric Farwell]
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