Lake Michigan is singer-songwriter Christopher Marks who, describes his music (rather accurately) as bedtime mumblecore folk. After moving to London from his childhood home, Marks sat down and recorded an EP with nothing but a cheap bottle of red wine for company. The result is Pylons, Telephone Wires, Trees In The Clearing, a collection of four songs which fits rather nicely into the lo-fi sadcore bracket we wrote about when featuring Molly Drag and Butterfly House.
The album opens with ‘Party’, an eerie introduction to the slow, dark aesthetic of Lake Michigan, mixing a dreamy dissociation with the cutting awareness of said isolation, leading to something that is sad and apologetic in equal measure. This continues into ‘Snow’, where Marks channels Malcolm Middleton in that I’m-so-miserable-even-my-surroundings-are-after-me sort of attitude, where the border between laughing and crying seems incredibly small and pretty insignificant.
“I’m watching falling foliage, it dances between stone slabs.
The suburbs are screwing me and I want out.
I’m picturing you walking in, it makes me feel chill, inebriated.
I’m trying to remember if it was you I saw when my eyes closed”
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‘Sober’ deals with the peaks and troughs of loving (“The thing about being alone and not in love is that it makes you feel sober… But when you start feeling it again, you are intoxicated. Blissfully stupidly ignorantly uninformed, yet smiling”), while ‘Real (Ad Breaks Pt. 2)’ runs with the idea of the passage of time and reality getting in the way of good times. Just as we described in our Free Cake for Every Creature write-up, post-collegiate blues can hit hard, and anyone who has left university will relate to Marks’ writing here:
“Guess who’s just another cross on the road maps, a place to get to via train.
The hours ran out and so did the days. I stopped trying to try.
We’ll never talk shit on my front step again,
we’ll never grace that beer garden again.
I wish that we could go back to that mismatched old room,
but people messed up and the rest of us grew up.
Now all that’s left is to keep on walking,
the breaks are now over
and real life has hit.”
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The EP is out now on Wolf Town DIY and Ruined Smile Records, or you can buy it from the Lake Michigan Bandcamp page.