Taken from the collection Everything is Waiting For You, David Whyte’s poem ‘Fishing’ finds him by the river in Burnsall, a place in which he and his mother liked to sit before her death. They used to take their “casual proximity” for granted, he notes, “as two together, still alive / moving from talk, to silence, to joke.” Lost in remembrance, his accumulated protections fall away, the realisation returning all at once that his mother is no longer there, and that her absence will remain for evermore. The final stanza emphasises this firm and simple fact with language just as plain:
So strange it was
to slip away
in the stream
from a hard won
maturity,
to feel abandoned,
the line spooling,
the bridge gone,
even the ground aswim,
a river going nowhere,
my hook snagging on thin air
and nothing hidden
in the flowing world
to catch, or bite, or tug again
Ground Aswim, the latest album from Caleb Cordes’s Sinai Vessel, takes its title from Whyte’s words. After the departure of two long-term collaborators, the record sees Sinai Vessel return to the solo project of its origins, and Cordes goes with the momentum of this inward turn to write with a renewed sense of vulnerability and candor. The urgency of 2017’s Brokenlegged is swapped out for a newfound restraint, and if the dense, cathartic noise of the former proved something of a shield, then the new arrangements are nothing so protective. Rather, the stripped back simplicity of Ground Aswim functions like a pane of glass, giving a direct view into the warm, fragile heart that has always beat at Sinai Vessel’s core.
In this way, the record follows its namesake poem, utilising fearless self-scrutiny and an economy of language to get as close as possible to the truth of things, no matter how difficult or painful. “We all had a sharp focus on allowing the songs themselves to step out from the fray in a way that they had not been previously highlighted,” Cordes explains of the recording process. “It feels dangerously raw at points, but simultaneously enthralling because it’s so vulnerable.”
Take opener ‘Where Did You Go?’, which centres on the loss of a childhood friend and the unresolvable perplexity of grief. To imagine someone gone is to think of the unthinkable, to live within the negative space of their absence. “For the better part of a year / I thought I saw you around,” Cordes sings, brain unable to process the situation. “Never met anyone / who’d left our little town / so I couldn’t figure where you’d gone to / if you weren’t with us now.” The song is crafted from the titular confusion, and poses the question that haunts Ground Aswim. How did this happen? How could this be so?
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‘Shameplant’ takes an introspective view, exploring one’s ability to love and be loved in a healthy manner, but also the difficulty that results (“it’s one thing / to act on / and another to just believe”). ‘George’ explores a different kind of love, troubled and platonic but no less real, functioning as both an analysis of what went wrong and an apology in the hope of making right. Elsewhere trauma arrives in other forms, be it with the whiplash shock of ‘Fragile’ or the steady, unbearable build of ‘Birdseye,’ but this sense of reconciliation remains.
Nowhere is this clearer than on penultimate track, ‘Tunneling,’ where Cordes addresses himself to turn the forgiveness inward. “Listen, Caleb, listen / please listen to me,” he sings. “This is no way to live, man / this isn’t healthy / You are under an exhaustion / that is common to us all / and you’re doubling the pressure / by assuming it’s your fault.” In its openness and sincerity, the song captures the spirit of Ground Aswin. The attempt to face up to pain whether it foreign or self-inflected. To sit with it, hold it in your palm. To understand that there is no answer to the questions of the record, only more compassionate ways of asking. If there is no stopping a swollen river, you must find better footing. Learn to steady yourself even when the line unspools and the hook snags on nothing, when the very ground is aswim.
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Ground Aswim is out now and available from the Sinai Vessel Bandcamp page.
Artwork painting by Daniel Hernandez, photograph by Bennett Littlejohn