The songs reflect this intention, providing soundscapes spacious and nuanced enough to become sonic representations of the environments which inspired them. Nico Osborne (electric guitar, acoustic guitar, contrabass, analog processing), Brendan Mulvihill (electric bass, synthesizers, analog processing), Jeremy Mendicino (electric guitar, twelve string guitar, acoustic guitar, analog processing) and John Thayer (drums, analog processing, noise) all lend their talents too, allowing Lea Thomas to weave tracks of layered richness in which the audience can lose themselves.

This sense of encompassing warmth is central to the record, and signifies the notable diversion from her previous work. Mirrors to the Sun might have celebrated nature but could never quite emerge from beneath the anthropogenic calamity it currently faces. “Implicit in any engagement with the natural world is its ever accelerating collapse,” we wrote in our piece on the record, with songs like ‘Heat Keeps Rising’ facing up to “the ongoing disaster in all its overwhelming weight, not to mention the dizzying strangeness of living through such a time.” But Cosmos Forever opts for a different outlook. One not naïve to the present situation, but determined to decentre the human within its arrangement. Which means a willingness to let go of the anxiety of unanswered questions and worries about the future to lose oneself within an ecological present.

Everything is one
And you already hold
The gift

The song comes complete with a video directed and edited by Dave Yim, with additional creative direction by Phil Robibero, which taps into the environment which proved so central to the song. “I moved from New York City to a small town in the Catskills a few years ago, and daily walks through the landscape have become an important ritual,” Thomas explains. “One of my favourite trails starts in an open meadow and winds into the woods, echoed in the arch of this video. The song follows a similar path, from light to dark, day to night, known to unknown.” Watch the video below:

Cosmos Forever is out on the 20th September and you can pre-order it now from the Lea Thomas Bandcamp page.

Photo by Wyndham Garnett, album art Artwork by Iruka Maria Toro w/ design by Daniel Murphy

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Such thoughts came to inform every aspect of The Fourth Wall’s Return Forever, an album which combs through the complexities and contradictions of the immigrant experience in order to voice feelings otherwise impossible to convey. Lead single ‘Never a Part’ introduced the record, a song based around an imagined conversation between Agustin and his grandmother which interrogated the nature of familial bonds. “With a sound at once visceral and soaring,” we wrote in a preview, “the song pushes into the intangible strangeness of unconditional love while confronting the poetry of forgetfulness head on.”

What the song best captured was The Fourth Wall’s ability to explore big picture concepts and highly intimate experiences simultaneously. Tracks like ‘Darkness of Heart’, a clever flip of Conrad’s classic novella which, as we put it previously, “present[s] a non-Western protagonist’s journey deep into the so-called ‘civilised’ world, only to see the truth behind the illusion of the American Dream,” eye themes with the widest of views, but never at the expense of the individual human lives governed by such forces. “My family history has always come to me in fragments and I’ve had the sense that there will always be an irreducible remainder that I will never have access to,” as Agustin explains. “I became interested in how this unintelligible past affects notions of my own identity.”

Return Forever acts something like a prism through which Agustin beams such complexities, each song offering one component wavelength of the unmanageable whole. Be it the xenophobic needle of opener ‘Interrupts the Dream’, the furious, affirming defiance of ‘Can’t Lose That Loss’ or ‘Grain By Grain’ with its marching rhythm, where a building intensity might lead to clarity or further confusion. “I recall you had eyes just like mine / Leaving your memory took so little time,” opens ‘Only The Joy’, a direct engagement with the story of a parent leaving a daughter behind. “Only the joy passed through.” The song encapsulates the layered nature of The Fourth Wall style. The bright, almost devotional sound possesses a tenderness which should be absent from such a scenario, resulting in a mixture of hope, denial and genuine love which not only subverts expectations but confounds any attempt to properly reassess. As though some decisions can be so complicated, their impacts so profound, that the very physics of emotions are bent beyond their own laws.

The penultimate track ‘Conatus’ plays something like the sonic equivalent of this phenomenon, escalating from hushed intimacy to joyous momentum and finally towards a chaotic finale. It displays a runaway energy capable of lifting one off their feet or burying them beneath its noise. As though having built beyond its own control the sound’s power must be left to crown or destroy whoever it may, and those involved are best advised to not take it personally. It’s left to closer ‘No Daggers’ to ask if blame might be attenuated in such circumstances. “Must it always hurt / For the wheels to turn / Can I love you still without any daggers?” Agustin asks, though ultimately concludes the record by foregoing any hope of a bright epiphany in favour of accepting irresolution as the natural state of things.

No one has to understand it all or forgive it all
When the codes reset forgetting all to save it all
I’ll still remember you

You’re my brightest one
I can’t give you up
This could be the ending
But you return forever

Return Forever is out now and available from The Fourth Wall Bandcamp page.

Album artwork and design by DB Amorin

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Fast forward a few years, and several releases later, Lea Thomas has unveiled Mirrors to the Sun, a brand new full-length on Spirit House Records which again looks to explore our position within the natural world. Take single ‘Hummingbird’, a track evoking the transportive, transcendent powers of nature. The song takes inspiration from a dream in which Thomas “dissolved into a pool of saltwater and re-emerged as a large white wolf,” dismantling the barrier between the personal and the wild. “I am a white wolf / Running, running, running free,” she sings. “Then I remember my heart started beating / To the sound of the universe / I leaned into the feeling / Like a hummingbird.”

Again evoking lupine imagery, ‘Howl’ picks up from this sense of freedom, conjuring the primal joy of finding love. The sense of movement and harmony in submitting to the force. Other tracks are more reflective, with ‘Magnolias’ pondering the impermanence so familiar to the ecological sphere, though emerging from the melancholy with a sense of healing and power. ‘How Would I dream?’ is equally wistful, the transience this time extending as far as memories and dreams.

But implicit in any engagement with the natural world is its ever accelerating collapse. ‘Heat Keeps Rising’ faces up to the ongoing disaster in all its overwhelming weight, not to mention the dizzying strangeness of living through such a time. “This song is a practice in continuing to ask the heavy questions even when it seems like there may be no immediate resolve,” Thomas told Guitar Girl Magazine. “We recorded it live and left a lot of room for improvisatory exploration so we could see where those questions would take us—surely, towards a new perspective.”

A video directed by Michelle Sui with cinematography from Alice Millar furthers this style, a visualisation which helps chart the surreal contours of the moment. The song opens with a relatively sedate rhythm, though Thomas’s vocals soon kick into a kind of tripping momentum, each line piling atop of the last and evoking the claustrophobic bustle of an ever-warming city. “The heat keeps rising,” Thomas breathes in moment of pause, though the instrumentation soon rises in response, pushing the track (and video) into a kind of frantic fever dream. Only, one from which there is no waking.

Mirrors to the Sun is too astute to offer much hope in such times, but Lea Thomas also refuses to submit to doom. They might not find answers within nature, but there is always consolation. Something in the wider impermanence that brings comfort to our own. The reinforcement of the present and its tender beauty. Final track ‘Close to Me’ is carved from such wisdom. Returning to the energies of the white wolf and dissolving dream in a subtle, humble form. No great transformation, but a (re)connection with nature nonetheless.

I trust my body when it tells me
That the work can wait till tomorrow.
Let the worries in my mind turn swift into sparrows,
Find their rest among the pines again.

Like the winds that had raised me and carried me here,
I could drift for miles understanding nothing
But the freedom song of the grasses
As they whisper for no witnesses:

Stay close to me

Mirrors To The Sun is out now via Spirit House Records and available from the Lea Thomas Bandcamp page.

Photography by Hannah Rosa Lewis-Lopes

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This month saw the release of Better Metric, a brand new EP. After retiring from a teaching career in high schools, Isabeau Waia’u Walker rerouted her energy towards music. After touring with Y La Bamba, she headed into the studio with sound engineer Ryan Oxford and set to work on the new songs. With help from Nick deWitt (percussion, organ), Andrew Jones (bass, stand up bass) and Oxford himself (guitar, percussion), Better Metric was formed, representing the clearest example of the ‘entire instrument’ philosophy.

Opener ‘Woman’ makes this clear. Four simple lines comprise the track’s lyrics, the repetition adding gravity to each word, the sentences stressed as searching questions and statements of intent, eventually drifting down to a barely a murmur but setting the album’s key themes at the forefront from the beginning. The words are inherently personal but somehow wider too, a timeless quality emerging that speaks of a deeper human experience.

Woman
How many years to become this woman?
Roots growing deep in soil growing a woman.
Late bloomer, all around.

This use of the personal to speak to larger themes is a key facet of the Isabeau Waia’u Walker sound. The delicate warmth of ‘Hymn by Her’ carries a sense of history, as though within the most intimate feelings lies a commonality too. But despite the sound it’s a melancholic track, desperate even, the narrator’s anger burning out into the grey ashes of sadness. This contradiction is the heart of the release, every moment of shared humanity or affirming wisdom countered with sorrow and confusion.

‘Great Endeavour’ comes with broken resolutions, yet the promise of growing older and becoming better. ‘Pull the Story’ is centred on both a lack of direction and looming change, the refrain “It is different now” delivered with a steely edge that might be hard-won confidence or sardonic fatalism. The title track, richly upbeat in sound, speaks of swallowed words and masked intentions. “Keep it,” Walker sings. “Bury it down further / Yeah, Keep it to yourself.” Closer ‘Ordinary Days’ is the most openly morbid, considering not only the worst but its habit to arrive without warning or fanfare.

Cause sad things happen
Sad things happen
A bad thing happened
On an ordinary day

None of these songs suggests a romantic edge to sadness, nor any easy way out. But they tap into something. Call it the air, the soul, the mind, the word. Call it shared humanity. Because the lesson of Better Metric, with its anger and sadness and unanswered calls into the dark, is that there is no solace to suffering. No noble end to loneliness, no value in pain. The sense of community of these songs, their inherent compassion, comes not from the act of suffering but the communication of the sufferer, the ability and bravery to reach out to others, across distance and time. It’s something to do with telling stories. Something to do with making art.

Better Metric is out now and you can get it form the Isabeau Waia’u Walker Bandcamp page.

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Earl Boykins – FRIENDS / Everybody Likes Dogs

(RIYL: indie rock, punk, jangle)

E.L.M.H. – Life Is Super

(RIYL: experimental, bedroom pop, ambient)

Emily Hope Jacobsen – Passenger EP

(RIYL: folk, acoustic, Sarah Winchester)

The Emptiness – Sadie, Hawaii

(RIYL: pop, VH1, Arrange)

Eric Funn – No More Blue Tomorrows 

(RIYL: anti-folk, outsider, Daniel Johnston)

Family Video – Too Short, Too Long / Maybe This Summer

(RIYL: lo-fi, pop, indie rock, Standard Fare, Waxahatchee)

Fairweather Currents – Truesdale

(RIYL: bedroom pop, lo-fi, Small Wonder)

Fanpage – Trip

(RIYL: indie rock, experimental, noisy clamour, Sweden)

Free Cake For Every Creature – “pretty good”

(RIYL: lo-fi, bedroom pop, indie rock)

Florist – 6 days of songs

(RIYL: bedroom pop, sad, lo-fi, Frankie Cosmos)

Flower Face – Homesick / Funeral Kid EP

(RIYL: bedroom, sad girl, sincere folk)

Fog Lake – Virgo Indigo

(RIYL: Ambient, dream pop, experimental)

Frankie Cosmos – affirms glinting

(RIYL: bedroom pop, sad, lo-fi, Adult Mom)

Garrett Walters – At the End of South Washington

(RIYL: punk, folk, Ghost Mice)

Geology – Our Intertwined Worlds

(RIYL: folk, indie rock, The Tourist, mewwithoutyou)

German Error Message – Haunts

(RIYL: ambient, bedroom pop, folk, The Microphones)

German Error Message & Lung Cycles – s/t

(RIYL: experimental, ambient, folk, The Microphones)

Girl Valley – June/July II

(RIYL: bedroom acoustic, lo-fi)

Ghosting – Virtual Saxophone Transmissions

(RIYL: vaporwave, smooth jazz, 80s movies)

Gleemer – Holyland USA

(RIYL: shoegaze, dream pop, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine)

Globelamp – Star Dust

(RIYL: dream pop, psychedelic, lo-fi)

The Goodbye Party – Silver Blues

(RIYL: bedroom pop, power pop, Radiator Hospital)

Gorgeous Bully – Smiling, Laughing

(RIYL: indie rock, lo-fi, sad pop)

Hands and Knees – American Cheese

(RIYL: indie pop, Constantines, Born Ruffians)

High Pop – Holy Smokes

(RIYL: punk, fuzz pop, Wavves)

Home Alone – There’s a Light Coming Through

(RIYL: bedroom pop, ambient, dark lonely nights)

Favourite Free Music of 2014 (E-H) from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

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