Joplin Rice is a musician from Lexington, Kentucky who makes personal bedroom folk meets lo-fi indie pop. His latest (and first ever physical) release is called Low Hum, an album which is at once pensively miserable and unhurriedly easygoing, something heightened by Rice’s tragically wry way of writing about life’s woes. Take for example ‘Lucky Man’, with its cool and laidback guitars and lyrics such as “I’m lit up like a burning car”, or the acoustic strum of ‘Perfect Coils’ in which he sings, “Hating myself now just ain’t the same“.
He’s capable of changing things up too. ‘Coffee’ is a fuzzed-out rocker which tells a sad little story of seeing a lost love around the town with someone new:
“I saw you buying records with your boyfriend
I just hid behind the shelf, started crying to myself.
I saw you drinking coffee, you were laughing
Was he telling you a joke? Did you see me leave alone?
Whereas ‘Haunt Me’ is more towards the folk side of the spectrum and centres on a pretty morbid question, “Would you haunt me if you died today?”, and finale ‘Parking Lot Waltz’ is a shuffling lo-fi rock song, with lines that bleed into one another, creating a stream-of-conciousness style vocal delivery – e.g. “i blow smoke back home i take ticking time bomb tambourine crescendoes endocrine releases into shaky muddy puddle people”.
Low Hum is being released by Practice Records, a label run by the good folks at The Modern Folk Music of America, which is one of the best music sites around and a champion of home-recorded, DIY music like this. You can get the album on limited edition cassette via Practice Records or as a pay-what-you-want download via the Joplin Rice Bandcamp page. Take note that if you pay $5 or more you’ll receive a bonus EP of demos that didn’t make the album.
P.S. Why not dig into the Practice Records back catalogue while you’re at it?