Lady Hope is a difficult album to categorise, it’s blown-out lo-fi aesthetic transforming what in another life were folk songs into something with a strange weight and power. It’s music constructed from the base elements, big and powerful and oddly foreboding, the perfect soundtrack for you lucky folk who get to watch the solar eclipse today.

Slow winding guitar opens ‘Dunes Revisited’, which eventually emerges as an ominously charged rock song, Theodore’s voice distorted and humming with feedback, like a radio wave pulled thin across miles and miles of barren sand. The initially simple acoustic folk of ‘Skin’ soon begins to ripple and roil like a fever dream, electric guitar rising at the midway point as Theodore, joined by Madeline Johnston, repeating slight variations on the same line in increasingly desperate tones.

In fact, no two tracks are quite the same. ‘Flu’ is a relatively sedate psych-tinged guitar instrumental, while ‘All the Dogs Revisited’ is wrapped in a storm of feedback, and ‘Equinox’ sees crunchy electric guitar shred and squeal. Penultimate track ‘Helios Adrift’ is a vivid, widescreen slice of near post-rock richness, rising to crescendos before sinking back into its slow tidal rhythm, the title track closer reverts to something far more grounded, an rough indie rock song of insistent instrumentation and hypnotic, spiralling vocals.

With its combination of droning noise and outsider folk, wrapped up with snaking tendrils of dense and snarling rock, Lady Hope is quite unlike any other album you’ll hear this year. It’s an hour long beast that’s unapologetically complex and opaque, but also has an uncanny ability to move you on an instinctive, subconscious level. In other words, the album serves as the perfect antidote to the age of the Spotify playlist, and we should be thankful that there are still people like Tucker Theodore plying their trade, prepared to pour everything into making art like this.

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The new year has seen a new track from the Nashville act. Appropriately titled ‘2017’, the song is probably best described as organic folk, following the above description in its use of various tones and textures which bring the acoustic strum into relief. Couple this with Kintzing’s gentle vocals and evocative writing and you have a song that’s quietly devastating, music that’s captured perfectly in the accompanying video, late-night solitude made strange by stark, staccato forces emerging from the sky or within the skull.

“Maybe I’ll leave my house
in 2017
‘The year of the Lord’
I’ll grow wings and fly into the sun
Is that God or just my own thoughts?”

You can get ‘2017’ now on a ‘name your price’ basis from the German Error Message Bandcamp page.

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The album opens with ‘wild fire/flowers’, a track which sounds like a cross between Yowler and Moutain Man, the opening a wild hymnal (“let is spread like wild fire / let it grow like wild flowers / everything we know comes from water”) before the introduction of electric guitar and a hazy ambient background. The song is a good introduction to Trust Fall’s aesthetic, the gentle bedroom folk littered with small moments that threaten to be less gentle, the lyrics wrapped in imagery of the natural world, reassuring and timeless yet also volatile, too large to control.

“I had a life
before I was born
in the water”

‘Monsters Aren’t Scary’ is a delicate song buried beneath reverb, the low grumble representing the titular monsters, while ‘Winter Walking’ is a short track in the vein of free cake for every creature or Cyberbully Mom Club, full of small, sincere details that read like an internal practise of a conversation that will never take place (“Winter walking by the ocean / this is a good rock to sit down on / you are a good friend to sit next to”). ‘Boundlessness’ has a similar feel, although a dark cloud has passed over the narrator, the easy joy of the previous track replaced by uncertainty and unease.

“When did we invite the storm in our home?
And I envy the way you seem to know the way.
I’ll try not to rely on your ghost”

‘In yr truck’ opens sad and lonely, like Girlpool played at half-speed in an empty field, before building into a frenzy, the guitars accelerating and the vocals becoming almost unhinged. ‘Maria’ is slow and melancholic, occupying a flat space of acceptance where the things you love have slipped away. “Everything will change,” she sings. “I must remember that,” as if trying to convince herself such heartache is natural. It becomes clear that the song details a dissolving relationship, the dissipation of love through the slow erosion of time and space.

“What do I do now? What do I say to you
in the kitchen, when you ask what I’ve been up to?
It’s not that you asked, it’s that you had to ask
It’s that you didn’t know that makes me so sad.
I miss you.”

The album closes with a cover of Keith Whitley’s ‘I’m No Stranger to the Rain’, which comes off as a triumphant finale, a moment of strength or assurance in the gloom, as if there’s a certain pleasure in passing through sadness and appearing intact on the other side. “But I’ll put this cloud behind me,” she sings. “That’s how the Man designed me / To ride the wind and dance in a hurricane / I’m no stranger to the rain”. It seems, perhaps ironically, that admitting to your metaphorical wet climate might just help you notice the sky brightening once in a while.

You can grab boundless and unafraid now from the Trust Fall Bandcamp page on a pay-what-you-can basis, and on cassette from Reflective Tapes.

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Nick Everett & Everybody is a three-animal totem pole of folk-turned-fuck it, a ceaselessly adroit rock tapestry read aloud in what must be the land of giants.

Everett has always been one to experiment and I have seen his music referred to as “noise folk” more than once. And so Elsethings is not a folk record quite as you know it. The band are not afraid to distort things a little, to take what could be an entirely respectable (but conventional) folk song and turn it on its head, to make it sound raw and brash and exciting. The first ten seconds of the album set the tone of things to come in this respect. Any expectations of a delicate and pretty folk record are smashed away with a chorus of yelps and the clatter of a drum kit (as an aside, Travis’ brilliant Cabin Songs bio makes a comparison between Adam White’s drumming and Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park – do yourself a favour and read it).

The album continues in this idiosyncratic vein, expanding on its nucleus of orthodox folk music and travelling down some previously untrodden paths. Everett’s vocals are probably the most delicate thing on offer and provide the perfect counterbalance to the record’s noisier elements. Hold On is perhaps the most accessible track on the album, with its almost pop-influenced chorus of “Sometimes its easier to wake up in the morning, drink my coffee and head right back to bed”. Although even this is accompained by the smash of percussion second time around.

You can download the album for however much you like on the band’s Bandcamp page, where you can also buy it on tape for a measly $8 CAD (about £5.15 in the UK). There is a neat little video of the making of the tape cases here. I would also strongly recommend his previous releases; old adventure/love songs (which is a far more conventional acoustic EP – one which Everett himself refers to as “Nick crying in his bedroom”) and rocky top.

N.B. There’s a really good interview with Nick Everett and Tyler Butler from a radio show called Northern Air on CJSR, a campus-based radio station that broadcasts out of Edmonton, Alberta. Listen to the show’s audio here for the interview. I’d also recommend checking out Northern Air on a regular basis, as it plays some really good acts that receive very little attention (at least here in the UK). If anyone knows Kristi then give her a trans-Atlantic pat on the back from us.

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