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

The post Lea Thomas – The Gift appeared first on Various Small Flames.

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

The post Lea Thomas – Mirrors to the Sun appeared first on Various Small Flames.