Fever Blister is a frustrated album, occupying a grouchy, sleep-deprived headspace where every little nuisance rubs you up the wrong way. The tone is set from opener ‘Dolly Parton’, a track that emerges from the throes of a teeth-aching hangover and imagines an escape from the realities of existence. “Sunday morning, wake up,” Conley sings over racing grunge guitars “I take off all my make-up / from the night before / and I am so hungover.” The blend of exhaustion and regret and the inescapable, cyclical nature of the habit has her turning for fantasy. “At times like this I could really use a friend,” she declares, “at times like this I think again and again and again and again, I wish I was Dolly Parton.”

Droll self-deprecation aside, the track could be viewed as a deeper dive, the hangover standing in for the mildly toxic experience of life itself, Dolly Parton the unachievable image of success. Viewed this way, the frustration of the song does not instigate the dreams of escape but vice versa, the unending tension between how we’ve been told life should be and how it actually turns out.

The idea is woven through Little’s Musket’s music. ‘Home for The Summer’ explores the dead months of the year, boredom crushing down as the collegiate fantasy is suspended until September, while the title track favours a brooding discontent. Here exasperation is stretched from one day to the next, repressed feelings gathering in an internal storm, a humidity that builds and builds until precipitating in the screamed release of the rambunctious closing minutes.

Highlighting the elasticity of Conley’s vocals, ‘Burn Out’ finds her more gentle and reflective until the chorus bursts in with a clear-eyed ferocity, and closer ‘Stoney Baloney’ shakes from sluggish beginnings into a nostalgic weave of regret and longing. Both tracks, and indeed the whole album, are conjured from the liminal space between hopes and reality—the inability to let go of what has been and might be causing the present to be a little greyer, a little more boring than anyone would wish. Fever Blister is a railing against this feeling, not with some self-help spurt of positivity but rather good old fashioned anger.

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Despite ostensibly being a break-up record, Float is an album keyed into the sadness of the mundane, the end of the relationship serving not as the monolithic centrepiece but rather a light that brings out the melancholy that exists all around. From the opening lines of ‘What If’, which asks “What if it was all different?” while promising not to go back, the record exists in the space between the troubled past and imagined futures that never came to be. The space is a familiar one because it marks our contemporary age. Ours is the time where the promises of our childhood collapse along with those of our politicians and technocrats, the sense of loss surrounding something that never existed haunts the personal, political and cultural spheres, pushing a low-level grief into every waking moment.

Which all sounds abstract and grand, though in reality becomes manifest in the most intimate matters. Just as the anxiety of ‘Night Owl’ butts up against the hope of ‘Market’, the crises of confidence and identity Calicoco explores born of the discrepancy between dreams and nightmares—where nothing is quite as good as you would like, and always threatening to get exponentially worse. Perhaps this too explains the tidal rhythm of the record, the way the guitars crash like breakers at one moment (‘Stay For a While’) and suck in low and slow the next (‘South’).

‘Rob’s Song’ is reminiscent of Act Of, the dual vocals and minimalist instrumentation lending a complete intimacy, while ‘Anchor Park’ is altogether richer, advancing from unsure beginnings into a spiky energy that fills the air with an ominous ambience. “When I was writing ‘Anchor Park’, I was trying to confront some of my early shame, fears, and anxieties that have followed me into adulthood, some of which touch upon sexuality and gender,” Caliolo explains. “I had this vision of going back to the park as an adult to acknowledge some of these things. It was honestly so cathartic to play an alter-ego and face those demons head on.”

Indeed, Float as a whole could be viewed as such a head-on confrontation, be it related to distinct moments in Caliolo’s history or the more diffuse emotions that permeate the present. The later is addressed in ‘Who Knows’, a track pitched halfway between pop punk and pop ballad, and closer ‘Oh My Love’ too, a lo-fi folk song of aching longing, playing like the late afternoon winter sun—honeyed and warm but stretching ever thinner, all the more beautiful for its fleeting shine.

Float is out now via Dadstache Records and you can grab it from the Calicoco Bandcamp page.

Album art photography by Lily Goldstein

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