“These little animals / Afraid of their dark / Still chattering on about / The ominous sky.” So sings Mother Juniper‘s Lindsay Skedgell on ‘These Little Animals’, the lead single from debut full-length Write the Soil Lighter on Spirit House Records. The line evokes the wider tone of the album, as well as that of the project as a whole. The sense of small creatures snuffling through the undergrowth of their own humble existence, yet nevertheless awed by the portentous weight of those things around them too large or abstract to quite fully grasp.
Joined by Matt Schlatter (bass, lead guitar, synth), Andrew Tivon Orenstein (drums) and Jon-Delia Freeman (violin), Skedgell brings this mood to life with the eye of a storyteller and a traditional folk style. Music as folk horror or fairytale, albeit grounded in a human experience. Each track a glimpse into the esoteric space between myth and reality, where auguries line up to signal our coming fates, and strange images resonate with deeper truths.
Opener ‘Carolina’ is a track we’ve described previously as “loaded with oneiric strangeness, the sense of uncanny discovery particular to dreams.” Here sleep comes as a blank slate, a space beyond the binding categories of reality where new stories can be crafted, both histories and futures escaped. “I often lost my name in my sleep,” Skedgell sings, and later ‘name’ is switched out to ‘needs’, the sound somewhere between ominous and alluring, as though to commit to such a habit carries both promise and unease. For the rest of the track speaks of lost loved ones, of a world on fire, an empire half-mad with its own desires. Where else might relief be found but sleep?
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But the foreboding is counterbalanced by a tenderness too. Take tracks like ‘The Sculptor’ or ‘The Amphitheatre’, which possess real warmth, even while haunted by the dead. ‘Black Locust’ is similarly fond in its tone, a love letter to a garden tree “at once cryptic and intuitive,” as we wrote in a previous review. “A contemplation of the value and beauty of what we cannot know.” As we noted then, the song serves a stellar example of the manner in which Mother Juniper broaches mystery with such a curious and instinctive eye. “If there are things beyond our understanding,” we continued, “deeper than our surface experience of the world, then Skedgell brings them into relief, skirting around their edges so that something of their shape might become apparent.”
The idea comes back to the image of small animals and the ominous sky, something Mother Juniper return to with ‘I Dreamt of a Snake’. “In this dream I was the snake / Said can you help me out?” Skedgell says, voice hushed and spoken. “All secret creatures are in danger / Of being found out.” The fear in ‘These Little Animals’ was leavened by the sublime potential of the ominous sky, as though fear of a certain size becomes its own transcendence. But here the tone is altogether more modest. Vulnerability as it is lived. And what results is the very thing which elevates Mother Juniper above much of the esoteric folk canon. For just as Skedgell is willing to walk out into the mystical, it is never done without human grounding. As highlighted by closer ‘Apology of Hades’, where even the god of the dead himself is wracked by remorse and regret.
Winter comes too early
Too early for me
I should’ve let you go
Not taken you from sleep
Write The Soil Lighter is out now via Spirit House Records and available from the Mother Juniper Bandcamp page.