Led by songwriter Morgan O’Sullivan, who works out of Portland, Oregon, five-piece Boreen last year released a record, Friends, via Good Cheers Records. As the title suggests, the album is constructed out of the stories and experiences of O’Sullivan’s friends. The blend of bedroom pop intimacy and ramshackle indie rock attitude forms the perfect medium through which to explore such relationships. The sound is generally upbeat, a sense of fun and playfulness never far away, but through this foundation run seams of sincerity and seriousness, the deep, often unseen meaning and connection that gives friendship a value beyond a mutual need to kill time.
After the success of Friends, the folks at Good Cheer have decided to look back into the Boreen catalogue and re-release their first album, Cartoons. The aesthetic of this record is altogether rougher, though the lo-fi sound pushes the same qualities of earnestness and connection, the songs inspired by the experiences of a young loved one mourning the loss of a close friend. In order to cope, they had turned to Disney movies, and O’Sullivan explores the idea of escapism through a mixture of live/toy instruments and field recordings.
The result is somewhere between Mt. Eerie and Alex G, the mundane captured in stark detail and woven into something altogether more fantastical. From driving a car to take a walk to the Youtube-induced miss of Halley’s Comet, O’Sullivan’s writing is rooted in the banalities of every day, banalities which either require escape or become escape tactics themselves, once viable distractions transmogrified into a prison of their own making. As such, despite the dreamy sound and sincerity of the emotions, a sense of dissatisfaction permeates the record, an itch that no cartoon or weed or sugary snack can quite scratch. And through this, Boreen avoid any accusations of being silly or twee, the childlike naivety not some affected front but rather a genuine attempt to preserve some sense of joy in a world where loss is all around.