Following on from last year’s Rearrangel, an album we described as looking “to capture the duality of any journey, where banal details and deep, almost spiritual meaning intermingle along a single road,” Spencer Sult’s Generifus returns this autumn with new record, Summerberrys. With Seattle-based musician Jonny Gundersen (Jonny G and the Music Factory) joining Generifus stalwarts Wilson Caicedo and Alex Fermanis, Sult took the band to the Unknown Studio in Anacortes with no steadfast plan, though with help from Karl Blau and Allyson Foster managed to record six new tracks as well as reimagining two old favourites. The resulting album provides a welcome expansion of the Generifus universe, again using Sult’s eye for the seemingly mundane details of day to day living to explore themes of growing up in the Pacific Northwest amid the wider backdrop of a hostile world.
Lead single ‘Waking Winter’ introduces the country-inflected rock through which this is delivered. A song of easygoing rhythm and dappled brightness which finds the wistfulness in dissatisfaction. “I don’t enjoy this,” as he sings in the opening line. “I should talk to someone, I should get it fixed.” Such emotions never puncture the track’s languid tone, nor is any solution offered. Instead we’re left with that sense of drift, the gap between knowing something is wrong and being able to set it right. The waking winter where no new growth is forthcoming, and all that is left to do is wait.
Cover photo by David Hoekje