With a debut record produced by Joel Plaskett on the way later this year, Sister Swire have been releasing a series of singles, and previous track ‘I Shot the President’ was a great introduction into the project’s beguilingly evocative style. “A dark lullaby written in response to The Devil and Daniel Johnston documentary,” as we described previously, the track explored “the experience of bipolar and psychosis in all of its ominous and multifaceted scope.” A song over which Johnston’s presence hung, the vocals holding “a conflicted tone somewhere between gentle and troubled,” and the idiosyncratic lyrics standing out with their strange charm.

Latest single ‘Pulleys and Gears’ might offer a different tone, but its style still very much possesses that singular Sister Swire personality. It’s an upbeat and mischievous track which holds up a bright front to hide its claws. Because beneath to infectious momentum and left-field charm sits a sizeable mean streak, embracing a malicious side and refusing to care who it upsets along the way. In other words, an encapsulation of the Sister Swire project. Entirely and wholehearted its own thing, regardless of what anyone else might think.

‘Pulleys and Gears’ is out now and available from the usual places.

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Today, we’re delighted to share a third track, ‘Whose Taxidermy Horse’. Slowing the tempo from the previous singles, the track drags and shuffles with an exhausted air, as though occupying a place too warm to bother, the surroundings slowly melting into a viscous swirl that bubbles of its own accord. Eventually, the vocals kick back in, this time with a renewed sense of energy, making the song seem like a piece of taffy that has been stretched thin, the middle portion looping and spooling in abstract patterns. Take a listen below:

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The EP is essentially an art-pop character study of the eponymous Samantha, the forty-year-old protagonist (That is, if she’s reliable regarding her age) brought into a surprisingly detailed relief across the five songs. As the title suggests, opener ‘Self-Portrait’ serves as our introduction. Samantha’s first-person description is somehow all the more authentic in its indecisiveness, the nebulous, changeable and sometimes conflicting details amass into something far more convincing than a straightforward or lucid profile. Samantha feels human from the first verse, fragile and fragmented and fierce to a point,  self-aware and self-depreciating and funny with it. She’s not optimistic or pessimistic but rather both at once, hope and despair tempering one another to create a wry dreamer, a romantic realist. A human, basically.

‘Looking For a Man’, a song caught between dreams and reality, finds Samantha in the company of one Charlie, a person inclined to pour too much wine (or maybe not enough) and ask if she ever thinks of their love (“I mutter Yes, dear and call on every last saint above”). In between disillusioned words about Charlie, Samantha outlines her ideal man, starting specific (5’9″, waist size 30, a generous heart etc.) and gradually lessening her requirements so that the the truth of the situation unfolds. It’s not so much that she’s unhappy with how Charlie exists in the relationship, but rather how she does. “I would surely settle down,” she says, “In a suburb of Cleveland / If it meant that I could be myself / For just part of the day.”

‘Saint Anne Medal’ shifts the focus away from Samantha’s introspection and thus opens up her world, introducing characters we don’t know in situations we can’t quite grasp, thrusting us into a life with all the connections and complexities you would expect. Here too the Catholic theme develops (after the Augustine reference in the opener), furthering the sense of family, tradition and duty, something expanded on in the subsequent song, ‘Consolation’. Fulfilling the ‘wordy’ promise, the song skips through a tale of grief and reprieve with Darniellian deftness, finding Samantha overrun by the growing feeling that nobody can properly understand her, that she’s forever alone in a world operating on a slightly different frequency. Think twee-indie-movie meets George Saunders, the situation sad and serious yet laced with a dry humour, although the laughs are maybe nothing more than disbelief grown too big to contain. Despite all that the song’s upbeat melodies and harmonies maintain a joyful air which, coupled with the lyrics, manage to paint the miseries on show in an almost positive light, not the limit or lack of life but rather the proof of it.

“I sat reading when the call, harsh, familiar, crass and curt, caught my ear. Why do you memorize such lies? said gruff Henry, lean and tall. I do believe he tried to flirt. He flung my book, he flung my heart into the tide. But the line that caused my fall and left me reeling, on alert, came from Jennifer. She’d surely empathize. [Jennifer:] Why would anyone recall the poems of saints, sackcloth for shirt, some zealots blubbering about the poor, their helpless cries? Consolation—is it so much to ask for? Is it too much to ask for?”

As you might guess from the title, the closing track ‘The Joyful Mother of Children’ finds Samantha a parent. “The long loneliness is over,” she sings, swamped by motherhood and engulfed in gratitude. “I found myself mouthing thank-you throughout the day”. The track is Samantha’s redemption, the validation of previous hopes and dreams, a reward for never quite surrendering faith. Indeed, the development is literally Biblical, echoing the joy of Psalm 113:9, serving as Samantha’s passing from confusion to peace.

“I found myself the joyful mother of children. I look out on the backyard, neighbours calling their sons in. I found myself asking, Ten more minutes? They’re just kids after all, not doing us any harm”

While ‘literary rock’ isn’t always an apt term, Samantha Says shows that rock/pop albums can aim as high as fiction in terms of character development. Throwing out the notion of binary happy-or-sad songs, the EP instead opts for something in between, or rather everything at once. Samantha is happy, sad, optimistic, pessimistic, cynical and hopeful within each song, let alone across the EP, and if you want your art to somehow imitate or represent life then surely that’s the only way to go. Basically, the release sounds like the product of a band finding confidence, cementing their aims and direction and realising how much scope for experimentation there is within songwriting. These are the bands you should keep an eye on. If you like The Mountain Goats, Okkervil River or The Smiths (without the terminal gloom), then you’d be a fool not to check them out.

You can buy Samantha Says now from The Chairman Dances’ Bandcamp page.

Cover art by Natalie Short

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Halfway through the recording process, Ebner’s father sadly passed away, and so the album took on a new focus. The track ‘To Remember’is based on an eulogy Ebner gave at his father’s funeral which addressed their relationship via a Fender Jaguar that his father bought back in the 60s.

You can buy the album right now, on your choice of white or clear vinyl, via the City States Bandcamp page.

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The second release was the aforementioned debut album, The Awkward Hello, Handshake, Kiss. The album smoulders with a brooding intensity, the sombre guitar and lonely cello complemented with a variety of forms of percussion to create an organic piece of art which billows and swirls and seems to seep through your headphones. Hailey Beavis also provides vocals on many of the tracks, allowing male and female vocals to interchange and interact (in a way that on several occasions brought to mind an even more sad and dolorous A Weather).

The Awkward Hello‘s opener, ‘The Floods Have Woken The Quiet Sleepers’ starts with delicate finger-picking and the gentle throb of percussion, punctuated with the aforementioned cello, and continues to build until a glockenspiel twinkles, heralding the crescendo that breaks the song as if it’s a pane of fragile glass, the repeated exclamation of the line “We go down” the beautiful shards that tumble away after the impact. Another of my favourites is ‘Thunder’, which is composed of a forlorn guitar, down-tempo drones and glum vocals. Ensure you stay tuned after the album closer for an incredibly beautiful hidden track that is just man and guitar and sounds like something from very early albums by The Antlers.

You can buy The Awkward Hello, Handshake, Kiss now from mini50 Records for a very reasonable £10. I would also recommend checking out The Good Ship, an album made by Stephen Houlihan (of Hiva Oa) and Hailey Beavis, which is also really quite lovely.

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