Alright, if you haven’t noticed by now then you’re never going to, I really really like Old Earth. Todd has released a bunch of great records which you can hear/buy over at his Bandcamp page and his last album, A Wake in the Wells is one of my favourite albums of the year (more on which in a few weeks). But he was apparently not satisfied with that, perhaps thinking that 2014 needed just one more lesson in taking folk music and rock music and lots of other music and creating something stark and original, something paradoxically both vague and urgent and precise.
What One Could, To These Three, Be For? is Old Earth’s thirteen-plus minutes-single-slash-EP. The track has all of the things that make Old Earth’s music so enchanting, such as guitars and atmospherics and snatches of ambiguous lyrics. It feels like a bad dream rather than a nightmare, the prevailing sense one of unease rather than terror. “Is it safe to wander the woods again?”, he asks. His reply of, “No? Is it safe? NO” nicely captures the anxious aura of ill-ease.
As with other Old Earth records, there is a stellar supporting cast, including members of Field Report (who made another of my favourite albums of 2014), Altos and Twin Brother.
You can but the EP via the Old Earth bandcamp page and you should because it’s really good.