Hartford, Connecticut’s Sorority Noise are back with an EP, It Kindly Stopped For Me, the follow-up to last year’s album Joy, Departed (which we liked a lot, describing it as, “music instilled with a higher sense of purpose and value…why settle for comfortable suffering when there is a chance of painful healing?”). The raw and honest emotion shows no sign of relenting on the new release. The EP, named after a reference to death in a poem by Emily Dickinson, is a stark and melancholy response to the death of a friend of lead Cameron Boucher, an exploration of not only grief but also the confusion and difficulty borne of trying to help others as well as yourself.
It’s apparent from the first few seconds of ‘Either Way’ that Sorority Noise have stripped things back to the bone on It Kindly Stopped For Me, the folky acoustic guitars joining tinkling piano and Boucher’s regret-filled vocals, delivering dark lyrics about the loss of his friend.
“You saw your life and you took it
Saw a chance to leave a life you couldn’t lead
You took your last breath
I was there when you took it
You know that we would love you either way”
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‘A Will’ is piano-led, with background guitar and a decidedly morose atmosphere (“I open up my jaw, I pull apart my skin / I don’t know where to begin, but I know where it ends”. ‘Fource’ sounds like the rambling of someone in the throes of a really hard time, quite literally pacing (you can hear the footsteps) as he smokes a cigarette and walks through the woods. Despite all the angst and worry, the narrator remains ultimately hopeful, at least if you’re convinced by his repeated insistence of “I think I’ll be okay, I think you’ll be okay”. The final track ‘XC’ proves a fitting finale. Beginning as another song steeped in whispered melancholy, it eventually rises into something more hopeful, with swirling instrumentation and background vocals akin to acts such as Bellows.
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The EP is not a fun or easy listen, but you get the real sense that it wasn’t fun or easy to write either. It’s a record that wasn’t created with the listener as its primary focus, rather an expression of one man’s losses and struggles. And that, after all, is what art is about, it gives us a way to say things that would otherwise be impossible, a way to attempt to figure things out for ourselves which has the double edge of helping others too.
It Kindly Stopped For Me is out now on Topshelf Records. You can order it now on 7″ vinyl, cassette or digital download via Topshelf Records or the Sorority Noise Bandcamp page.