Dissimilar South are an indie pop band from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Led by duo Maddie Fisher and Carter Hodge, the band draw on the state’s rich musical history, creating contemporary Americana songs that swap the dust and twang for indie pop melodies, electric guitars and synthesizers. But musical style is not the only thing the band are out to update. They are also looking to blaze a trail for better representation in a genre that’s often viewed as traditional and conservative, exploring the same themes of love and loss and yearning but through an inclusive, queer lens.
Tricky Things, the debut full-length Dissimilar South album released last month on Cruisin Records, finds the band begin to perfect this formula. A record full of songs at once classic and very much of the moment, a mélange of old and new, pop and folk, which somehow gets at truths reachable only via the sum of its parts. Take lead single ‘Baby Blues’, a duet in which Fisher and Hodge take turns to weave separate stories before coming together to harmonize in the chorus.
Dry your baby blues
I’ll come back for you
Won’t be long
I know I’ve been gone
But it won’t be too long
Songs like ‘Melodrama’ and ‘Fear of Flying’ are cut from the same cloth as the latest Waxahatchee album, the easy going rhythms born of hard-won wisdom, melancholy and compassion swirling into an overarching sense of affection. This might take the form of reflection, as with the contemplative ‘Grand Adventure’, or a very present form of love as seen on the cathartic self-caring closer ‘Letting Go’. Meditations on relationships that have been, that will be, or relationships sliding into being no longer, all told with an emotional honesty which marks Dissimilar South as something more than just another indie pop band flirting with country twang. Their songs feel like the next step in a rich lineage. Proof that, ultimately, the sense of yearning and vulnerability is timeless, and while the queer experience might have been neglected historically, a new line of songwriters are emerging, determined to set this right.
Tricky Things is out now and available via the Dissimilar South Bandcamp page.
