Princess Daddy, the new album from Santa Rosa, California-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Hunter Ellis on Earth Libraries, bears the history of its creator. Since joining post-rock group The Coma Lilies in high school, Ellis has worked across a variety of musical genres and roles. From learning about engineering while working at the Grizzly Studios in Petluma to moving to Portland, Oregon and playing in bands like My Dads, SHAT and Mean Girls, then starting a solo career in 2012 and eventually building his own studio in which to work. The new record feels like the culmination of these experiences, with Ellis inviting a host of collaborators and friends to bring the vision to life.
Opener ‘Is This Your Card’ sets the tone, its simmering introduction drawing on Hunter Ellis’s post-rock roots before blossoming out into something between psych and prog. The vocals emerge cryptic through the track’s dense substrate, impassioned but cloaked in mystery, words as heard from another room. ‘Exit Wounds’ is altogether closer and more direct, though the clarity of the delivery belies the intricate detail and shape-shifting mood to come. As Ellis’s lyrics emerge, he finds himself bound up into the accelerating rhythm, fired into an intense barrage of near-screamed noise, before the track levels out into quiet again.
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This interplay between competing styles and tempos is typical of Princess Daddy. A record seemingly doing everything but sit still. ‘Lil Rocks’ passes with a brooding restraint, never quiet fulfilling its promise to spill over, while ‘For The Beast’ adds a country inflection as Lady Dan‘s vocals play like some alluring prophecy of doom. The polished warmth of the textures stands apart from that of ‘Orenda’, a track of quick turns and jagged edges, while closer ‘We All Fall Down’ combines the two. A lit fuse which edges towards its target, culminating in a climax of crushing noise.
But it’s the title track which best captures the record’s spirit. A seething, stalking song which manages its significant heft without sacrificing nuance. The rhythm ebbing and flowing, snapping like elastic as it stretches out and back again, the vocals hovering as though waiting for some imminent turmoil to fall. The sound of a project developed over years, between spaces and styles, put together now and fully-realized for what might be the first time.
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Princess Daddy is out now and is available from the Hunter Ellis Bandcamp page.
