“To the listener, each [song] feels like a picture,” writes Nick Schroeder in the album notes for red birds on a branch, the new EP from Tremolo Fields. “A physical one that you hold in your hand, playing tricks with the light.” The description is apt in more ways than one, speaking to both the vividness with which the songs are brought to life, as well as their succinct nature, their completeness and tactility. The moniker of Portland, Maine-based songwriter and multidisciplinary artist David Rogers, Tremolo Fields “combines folk sensibilities with rock and electronic styles to weave its evocative sounds,” as we wrote back in 2023, with album still as can be “capturing a balance between physical and ethereal sensations […] passion and desperation—love as a kind of longing, even in the present moment.”
red birds on a branch furthers this style. Each track is a snapshot, or rather a specific scene suspended. A moment or memory frozen in time yet still possessing all its dimensions. The listener is invited to step inside these tableaus, not only to explore the fine details therein, but also imagine the narratives which have led to that picture, as well as that which is yet to unfold.
The entire effect is captured within the very first moments of opening track ‘Spiral Kitchen Linoleum’. “Unopened mail by the microwave,” Rogers sings over a warm and wistful arrangement. “She sensed there’s something you wanted to say / All the words just looking for the right ones / spiral kitchen linoleum.” The precision of the imagery does more than conjure a scene. It evokes memory, yearning, fears and dreams, as though life itself is distilled in the smallest of things. Unopened mail, the hum of a refrigerator (it is fitting the next track on the record, ‘Nighthawks’, evokes Hopper). These details point to the past, yes, but also the future, its characters heading towards a difficult confrontation, the kitchen seemingly laying in wait.
The result is something of a new era for Tremolo Fields. John Ross of Wild Pink produced the release and his fingerprints are noticeable. Where still as can be had a certain off-kilter charm, red birds on a branch is richer, deeper, more complete. The rough edges of its predecessor not so much smoothed over but layered into a more cohesive whole. Be it the nocturnal glow of the aforementioned ‘Nighthawks’, where a loneliness seems to bloom into shimmering possibility, or the altogether sleeker ‘Rooftops’ and its brooding allure. Ross helps breathe an effortless complexity through the arrangements which matches the project’s overall spirit. The beguiling attraction of an image. The surface and its implicit depth.