To write that Anniversary, the new album from Abigail Lapell on Outside Music, is a record about love might be to set the wrong impression, though the statement is entirely true. Because “love on the album is [not] merely of the romantic sort,” as we wrote when first introducing the record, “with a series of personal milestones prompting Lapell to contemplate the phenomenon in all its guises, offering a picture of relationships and commitment with all the complexities left intact.” Lapell turned forty as the fifteenth anniversary of her father’s death passed, and soon her family celebrated a number of marriages and births. Life itself seemed to be working to undermine the reductive picture of love so often put forward in our culture, and Lapell set out to offer an alternate representation. “I wanted to explore some of the contradictions within the pop culture notion of love,” as she explains. “These dichotomies of light and dark, love and loss, fleeting and eternal—even in the traditional wedding vows, ‘sickness and health, richer or poorer’.”
Enlisting Tony Dekker (of Great Lake Swimmers) as co-producer, Lapell recorded the album at the historic St. Mark’s Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. The pair worked together to transfer the space’s majesty and haunting resonance into the songs themselves. What results is a sound capable of holding the dualities of the record, where space, patience and quiet can meet charged energy. Despondence and transcendence coexist. Be that the title track and its weighted symbolism, which presents, as we described previously, “romantic chemistry, as both otherworldly magic and physical reaction,” the poignant drama of ‘Footsteps’, or slow dawning warmth of ‘Count On Me’, where Great Lakes Swimmers join for a duet of gossamer light and steely determination.
Which isn’t to say Abigail Lapell sticks to the wistful reflection. “A toe-tapping, foot-stopping country rock song shot through with a determined energy,” was how described ‘Rattlesnake’ in a preview, where the “finger-picked electric guitar line charges the lyrics full of prophetic charge and esoteric weight.” The song not only displays the more rock-adjacent dimension of the album, but serves as the perfect example of the symbolism stitched through it. As though each track is a shorthand for something far larger, memories and even cultural histories coded in various objects and images presented within their lyrics.
‘Flowers in My Hair’ is perhaps the most direct version of this style. Great Lake Swimmers again join to lend the track a hymn-like quality, somewhere between communal sing-a-long and call-and-response, and the hand-clap rhythm offers a ritualistic edge. Factor in the repetitive lyrics and the song becomes something like an incantation. Moving beyond conscious thinking towards ingrained cadence and muscle memory. Something, then, a lot like love itself. Latent and mysterious and ever-present for those willing to search out the strange forces it can set in motion.
Anniversary is out now via Outside Music and you can get it from the Abigail Lapell Bandcamp page.
