Vio/Miré are a band from Providence, Rhode Island, led by Brendan Glasson. Their fourth album, You Will be Spending Time Outdoors, in the Mountains, Near Water, came out last September. Their music is a mixture of folk and ambience, with reed organ, cello, chorals and synths used to create lush soundscapes upon which Glasson’s poetic vocals float. Think Sea Wolf mixed with an orchestral Sufjan Stevens, folk songs written over the top of cinematic compositions.

The album is one of contradictions, somehow sounding intimate and expansive, gentle and harsh, poetically abstract and beautifully simple. In this way it manages to mirror nature in all of its guises – spellbindingly beautiful and callous and cruel and innocent in a way humans are no longer able. For example on ‘Dogs 1′:

dogs are barking in an alley way
they’re fighting over bones
I love the moment till I curse the day
breaking bottles over stones
and I have seen the grass’s easy sway
under spruces overgrown
and I have known the near to move away
how the wind was overblown

As with anything related to the natural world, mortality and death is a major theme. Much of the beauty and sorrow on the record can be traced to the transient nature of life, something that manages to be bleak and comforting and harrowing and joyous all at once. Much of this is barely explainable, much better felt through the music than explained by words, but it is something similar to the curious mixture of wonder, satisfaction and melancholy felt when looking at a range of mountains or rugged coastline. ‘Snakes’ closes with a contemplation of life:

sent to hell to stir and swelter,
I returned and sought my love

but if the way were many days,

if present passed as present does,

how would you ask someone how his journey was?

You would be forgiven for thinking this all sounds a bit New Age-y but it is anything but. You Will be Spending Time Outdoors, in the Mountains, Near Water feels less like a 45-minute album than a landscape, a world which existed long before the album was recorded. Vio/Miré offer a way into this place, and you would be a fool not to take their hand and experience it for yourself.

You can buy the album from the Vio/Miré Bandcamp page.

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However, in the year following the release of their last album, Huebert began to suffer from a severe inner ear condition, a problem which evaded conventional diagnosis. Anyone who has suffered from ear problems will know that they can be far more crippling than you would imagine. You can’t hear other people and can’t tell if they can hear you, leading to a profound sense of isolation and often panic. Indeed, Huebert suffered from anxiety and depression, a problem accentuated by the fact that the one sense he relied on to make sense of his emotions was taken away from him.

In lieu of a clinical solution, Huebert turned to meditation and prolonged silence and eventually began to piece together a new album, rehearsing with his band at very low volumes to ease the pain. The resulting songs ultimately became Nervous, an album that charts the period and explores the interplay between physical and psychological suffering, utilizing a beguiling brand of gothic art rock and the dream-logic of a labyrinthine haunted house, or perhaps of Huebert’s mind during the troubling period.     

The record opens with discordant instrumentation and unsettling children’s choir vocals that swirl menacingly like the theme of an evil cartoon. Huebert’s familiar vocals kick in after a minute or so, whispered through the reappearing choir and Colin Stetson’s sax with an earnest desperation, imploring you to listen. “Sometimes you get caught,” he sings, “sometimes you get away. It goes without saying.” The track sets a precedent of unorthodox song structure, with tracks on the album often morphing into distant relations of their former selves, swerving off in directions unseen.

The second track, ‘Bank Accounts and Dollar Bills’, is the pure embodiment of the aforementioned shapeshifting. It begins with a laidback tropical vibe with breezy vocal melodies, before entering a big, punchy (almost Arcade Fire-esque) chamber pop phase. Around two-thirds through it then mutates again, this time to feature sci-fi synths, before finally reverting to the easygoing slide guitar and thus completing the song’s varied cycle.

‘Violent Motion Pictures’ feels like a dream, with its opaque imagery (“Do you really want to see statues turn all the way around to say hello?”) and abnormal, fluctuating narrative. Stetson’s sax makes another appearance, snaking around like the tendrils of a nightmare and making the childlike falsetto “la la la” chorus sound more than a little ominous. The song switches at the halfway point, escaping its cramped and claustrophobic corridors, a creaky old door opening onto a wide and open plain. Huebert’s whispered vocals ride the swirling air currents, “The devil on your shoulder, it’ll get the best of you”.

‘Oval Window’ is perhaps the most similar to previous Siskiyou releases, a surprisingly upbeat song about the psychological problems linked to Huebert’s ear condition. “Maybe I’m just dreaming,” he sings, “sometimes it’s hard to tell”. The song manages to take a difficult subject and make it somehow triumphant, culminating in the refrain “the roof is spinning around me and I can feel the world below my feet”. The title track begins hushed and restrained (“does it hurt all the time? Yeah, I can empathize”) before turning psychedelic, while ‘Imbecile Thoughts’ is a folk-rock song, like a woodsy version of Wolf Parade, picking up the pace as the lyrics tell the tale of an introvert girl, “you gotta get out of the door girl and go look at the sky and wonder why the sun don’t shine like it should and why you are always so misunderstood”. The song builds and builds as Huebert breathlessly delivers the vocals and drums clatter and guitar feedback wails over everything.

Nervous is an album of dizzying scope and ambition, quite literally the tumult of sound and emotion inside one man’s head. It is by turns dark and creepy, shimmering and vibrant. Siskiyou have never sounded so eerie, so threatening, or so expansive. And I have to admit, I don’t think they have ever sounded so good.

Nervous is out now on Constellation Records.

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The band utilize an odd brew of instruments, including the standard fare of guitar, piano bass and percussion, as well as cello, flute, harmonica, mandolin and even circus organ. Opener ‘Redbird’ is an instrumental track which reminded me of JBM but then ‘Big Chief,’ another instrumental, uses flutes to invoke mystical-desert images, and while I’m no expert on Native American music (so this might be a pop culture-induced error), we get the most explicit shamanistic vibes of spirits inhabiting bright star-filled skies and hard flat plains filled with scrub and birds and visions.

Other standouts include ‘Infestation’, a dark and rollicking number supported by stuttering cello and wild harmonica, ‘Blood in Common,’ another finger-snapping rock track and ‘Sevens’, which a far more gentle, pastoral folk song.

There’s a strange something that runs through these tracks, and to ignore this something is to miss what makes the album so distinctive. This something is not entirely earthly but neither is it extraterrestrial. It’s more about that feeling of profound mystery we feel when looking into space or considering existence beyond our own experience of it. It’s to do with our relationship with the moon and the stars before we started measuring them and visiting them and giving them numerical codes as names. It’s an album about unanswerable questions. This is captured perfectly on the final track, ‘All You Celestials’, with its lyrics of :

“Didn’t you see how the moon split the sky
and poured out it’s cold light on hollow dark nights?
And all you celestials in orbit display
a circular pattern of waxing and wane.”

You can buy the album now on CD, Vinyl or digital download via Bandcamp.

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The debut album, I Thought It Was Us But It Was All Of Us, is a melting pot of genres, with elements of chamber music, shoegaze, ambient and drone all mixed together with dreamy vocals to form something difficult to categorize but mightily effective.  The result is an album of experimental songs that explores aspects of different types of music without ever feeling inaccessable or difficult to listen to.

The record is one of many layers and the context in which you listen to it produces very different experiences. As background music to an evening it is a pleasing listen that is easy on the ear, never getting too harsh and jarring you out of whatever else you may be doing. As the soundtrack to a train journey it brings to mind the slow machinations of the city or countryside, with tracks slowly unfolding with a natural ease. Best of all, and where I Thought It Was Us But It Was All Of Us comes into its own, is a fully involved listen, maybe lying in bed, surrounded by darkness. The layers becomes more pronounced, each strand separates and becomes an important piece of a complex arrangement. It’s the perfect night time headphone adventure in which to lose yourself.

The album is out now on Constellation Records.

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