The River Ouse runs near Mount Caburn in East Sussex, running south from the town of Lewes. Over three hundred miles away, the River Ouseburn works its way into the River Tyne. The rivers are different in size, separated by great distance, but they share something more than a name. That constant flow, a search for wider bodies of water beyond the familiar eddies of their own space. The are not the only rivers in the country, not even the only River Ouses, but they share a spirit all the same.
Orpine is a band born of such a shared spirit. Calling the south home, Eleanor Rudge lives a stone’s throw away from River Ouse. And based in Newcastle, Oliver Catt is just down the road from the River Ouseburn. Despite the distance between them, the pair had crossed paths in the past—shuffling around different bands, singing on one another’s records—only to lose touch. But the connection was seemingly more resilient than even they knew, because years later Rudge reached out again, and a trip to Black Hill in the Scottish Borders saw not just a rekindling friendship but the beginning of a meaningful collaboration. The birth of Orpine.
The result is Grown Ungrown, an album released by Heist or Hit that celebrates the intangible links of friendship and happenstance by looking to nature. “Forgoing the trappings of contemporary life,” we wrote in a preview, “the album is a celebration of the natural and organic—tapping into the great rhythms of nature so as to create a space in which their own emotions can ebb and flow.”
The idea is made clear in opener ‘Same Tree’, the simplicity of the title image evoking the compassion and warmth of the record as a whole. “We fell out of the same tree, together,” Catt sings in the first line, a kind of origin tale for the band. Their paths down might have been different, each hitting different branches on the way, and their paths at the bottom might go in opposite directions, but the togetherness is rooted deep.
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Indeed, rather than lamenting separation and time spent apart, Orpine find comfort in the knowledge that thing shift and change. “A song ostensibly about loss and mourning that nevertheless finds the time to cycle through various moods and states,” single ‘Sodern’ is “a seasonal track that finds not only comfort in the patterns of life, but something like awe.” There is no clear binary of together and not, just as there is none between summer and winter, growth and ungrowth. But there is some wonder in these grand patterns of life.
It’s with this mixture of wistfulness and joy that ‘Climbing Black Hill’ unwinds, its quiet ruminative tone inflected with gladness. “Climbing Black Hill,,” they sing, “there is life in my veins, there is sun on my face / Being there still when I’m having bad days, see the clouds float away.” ‘Hands’ offers a slower, more morose mood, but still the motif of movement and flow brings comfort, while the lopsided stagger of ‘Geese Migrating Overhead’ is full of uncertainty and indecision, but soon finds an ethereal, almost transcendent state that pulls away from crippling fears and mundanities and takes flight toward warmer climes.
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We might live in an age where technology can link even the most separated friends, but the danger is that a cheap copy emerges, a kind of simulacrum of a relationship with no substance or depth. Orpine reject this in favour of something less immediate but more intuitive. Something spiritual even. A sense of closeness encoded in memories and deeper still, some wilder part of our being where the feel of wind and rain and early morning sun carry their own familiarity. And with it a sense of rightness, of purpose, of moving toward what is correct. The sensation that geese surely feel when the small changes coalesce and the time comes once more, lifting upwards to soar overhead.
The penultimate ‘Two Rivers’ marks this feeling with a return to the Ouses and their synchronicity. There’s a hushed tone to the song, something between simple and scared, but the sense of movement is still very much present. For even if we cannot migrate, there are other ways to be together.
Yesterday I sank to the bottom of the Ouse
And Caburn faded from view
Sinking real slowly I was enveloped in
The silky silt and nothingnessEasier to be
Than to be gone
Grown Ungrown is out now via Heist or Hit and available from the Orpine Bandcamp page.
