C. M. Slenko is the man behind Sioux Trails Records, a digital record label putting out ‘autobiographical recordings’ which fall somewhere between folk, ambient and drone. Royal Blue Days, his latest release, is inspired by the Pennsylvanian’s first year in Chicago, recorded to tape in spare moments and late-night snatches and committed to digital format at a later date. This process meant he had to relive “a year that I had trudged through with my head down like a man in heavy snow” to create “less as a document and more as a testament of a year in Chicago.”
The release opens with ‘Voiceless Keyhole Still Speaks’, a discordant and atmospheric intro, like the ghost of a mountain folk song hanging over an empty room, followed the strange near-psychedelic ‘Swell’. ‘Pale Moon’ is a classic folk song, drunk and self-deprecating and struggling to survive in time-old fashion, while ‘Somnambulent | Still’ provides the first real taste of sparse drone and evocative guitar, what Ry Cooder’s soundtrack might have sounded like had Paris, Texas been an hallucinatory slasher flick. The track builds in density and weight, cumulating in a thick storm which reverberates through the middle half and leaves your ears ringing in its aftermath.
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From here there are too many songs to describe in full, but it’s safe to say that Slenko explores the whole gamut of sounds between folk and drone. ‘Lay it Down’ is a distant strum, as if sung ahead clouds of sleep, and ‘While the Sanctuary Burns’ is a slinky number, a late-night prowler creeping ahead with a curious dread, the lyrics billowing out with assurance as if privy to some obscure truth. ‘Theme for Chicago in Winter’ is muted as if beneath snow, the ticks and hisses hinting at life below, while ‘Short Circuit, Long Night…” emerges like one of Molina’s transmissions, a gentle song both cynical and sincere, the edges smoothed by the bombardment of bad luck and loss.
“I put flowers on my window
and I watched them die one by one
perhaps I’ve put a hex on my own home.
And I sat up all night drinking and thinking,
waiting for your transmission to come through.
It’s night like these it gets so bad that you gotta ask the dark
for songs that help you through the night.”
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‘Monday Morning’ starts serene but erupts in violent noise halfway through, like a ghost screaming through static, before the track becomes a wistful folk song. ‘Clarion, Carillon / Carrion’ returns to irritated drone, disturbing the air like a night storm, while ‘End of the Night, End of the Line’ switches back to hopeful melancholy. “When you’re lost in the dark between two faint lights,” Slenko sings, “it’s hard to tell which is heaven and which is hell.” ‘Kings’ is something of an upbeat rock song, ‘Not Just Angels’ a decidedly celestial ambient number with an odd spoken word passage about devils and death and divine miracles of questionable intent, like the agitated reasoning of some Southern Gothic zealot locked out of society. The piece morphs into a slow folk dirge, a twitching fever dream beneath evening redness in the West, and expands into ‘S(hhh)mmer’, its shuddering soundscape a portent for an obscure approaching violence. ‘Shallow’ comes on brash and mean as if gripped by new-found conviction, though ‘Moonlight’ ropes things back into something like reality, and after one final doom-drone turn with ‘Blood Moon’, ‘ Ohio River Flowing North (H. H.)’ closes out the album with plaintive hope, sung from one of those clear-eyed night hours where life arranges itself into something near context and even the worst moments can be recalled with a queer fondness.
“You can walk for miles and miles
and never see another door
You know you’re back in the sticks
when you can’t pull the cold from your bones”
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Royal Blue Days is long and shape-shifting, sometimes sad and sometimes sure and always ready to surprise. In this way it is as successful a testament to a single year that music will ever manage, ebbing and flowing with mood and the moon, settling on no firm conclusion beyond the steady flow of time and our uncertain position within it. You get the impression that these songs were recorded because they needed to be, loaded into one mammoth album because they were meant to be, shared so they might help us in the same way they helped him. As Slenko sings on ‘End of the Night, End of the Line’: “So I’m counting on these songs to save me now because I can’t leave it up to fate.”
You can grab Royal Blue Days now from the Sioux Trails Records Bandcamp page. While you are there, be sure to sift through the back-catalogue. I’ve only dipped my toe in so far but there are some great albums to explore from a variety of Slenko’s friends and collaborators.