Across two full-length albums and a handful of EPs, New Hampshire’s Party of the Sun have established themselves as one of the most interesting psych folk outfits working today. Consisting of Ethan McBrien, Rory Hurley and Garrett Cameron, the project reworks seventies sensibilities towards something new. Take ‘Tamarack Gate’, an environment of lush guitars, gentle vibraphone and pattering percussion where “McBrien’s vocals winds their way through the world as one might a temperate forest,” as we wrote previously, “their slow quiet muted by drizzle and dew as they reflect on the value of a more sedate style of living.” Or Capsule II which found the band, as we put it, “unafraid to follow sonic tangents in order to fully elucidate the themes.” Songs rich in invention and always tied to the environment, concerned with searching for new ways to evoke life in its complicated beauty.
Again released via Trailing Twelve Records, new double single Giver // River is the latest step in this continued process. What the label describe as a release which “explores the complexities of navigating unprecedented times through wailing guitar solos, contemplative lyrics, and a single crooning vocal.” There’s a languid rhythm to ‘Giver’ which belies any of the release’s more difficult themes, the vocals sat within a warm bed of electric guitar and listing a growing list of things one might away. “Give it death, give it strength, give legs and give it grace,” as the track opens, “give it luck, give it a stone, give it jealousy’s broken bone.” As the sequence unfolds, the entries offer a myriad of tones—heartfelt, wryly funny, odd and poetic—and the accumulation comes to represent a life of its own.
‘River’ offers a more sedate pace, its reflective acoustic strum landing somewhere between fondness and melancholy. Again the lyrics are delivered as something of a list. “River that’s swollen, a river that gives, a river that wrecks and a river that spreads. River that’s losing, river that winds, a river improving, a river that climbs.” A song flowing not unlike its central image, its rhythm timeless in its calm yet never quite the same thing twice. The lyrical style of both songs achieve this result, the sense of detail and level of abstraction granting the listener some semblance of control in terms of what they read into or take away. “These songs are like sleds flying down a hill, you can jump into them, steer them where you like,” as the band explain. “Pick new words, new phrases, they’re songs in motion, they were recorded quick and rough, they’re about the scene, the tragedy of war’s persistence, the lingering cure and the complexity of change.”
Giver // River is out now via Trailing Twelve Records.
