Out later this month on Specialist Subject Records and Plastic Miracles, the record sees lead Lily Mastrodimos joined by a whole host of collaborators, with John Ambrosio, Marlene Bellissimo (Dreamsounds), JB Fulbright (Prior Panic), Emma Witmer (gobbinjr) and R N Taylor (Sparky Deathcap/Los Campesinos!) all lending their talents, as well as Mastrodimos’s cousin Jessica Taylor and even her child baby Rudy. A supportive cast which furthers the record’s sincere, communal tone. Together they create a space in which Mastrodimos need not walk on her knees in order to make a record, but rather rediscover the joys of songwriting in the spirit of Oliver’s soft animal.

The record follows 2020 release World’s Strongest Dog, Long Neck’s self-released second album which experienced more than its fair share of problems. Soft Animal sees Mastrodimos emerge from this period a little tentative, definitely changed, trying to figure out where writing songs fits amid the trials of an insecure music industry and general despair of the wider world. An attempt, that is, to look beyond these obstacles and return solely to the pure motivation to create. “This is an album about addressing these instincts and attempting to reconnect with a dormant part of your being,” said Mastrodimos. “I recorded it to prove to myself that writing music is something I can still do, and that I still love doing. I wrote it as an act of self-love, tenderness, and as a way to process the anger and frustration that stems from living through a pandemic.”

Lead single ‘The Gardener’ gives an insight into just what this sounds like. A song which starts out deceptively bare with its wary guitar, Mastrodimos’s unguarded delivery both intimate and uncertain. “Every dream I’ve had this week has taken place at night,” she sings, “Nothing in the sky, no planes passing by / when the sun emerges I am baffled by its glare.” But as the song emerges so does Bellissimo’s violin, its lush warmth not so much replacing the cautious tone but lending it a compassionate weight. The effect is furthered by backing vocals at opportune moments, a gentle yet stirring addition which gives another meaning to the phrase. Backing as in having your back. “Mornings are unbearable / I said to no-one / and they responded / but won’t you miss it when its gone?”

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Opener ‘Julie’ is simple and quietly devastating, the soft and sincere tone masking a message that is devoid of hope. Framed as a reminiscence, the song focuses on snippets of conversation and images of the surrounding world as it continues to spin around a moment of very human struggle. It serves as both an introduction and a challenge to the rest of the album. “I see the first song as a hypothesis,” Yield describes in an interview with Post-Trash, “that there’s no consolation to be had for the fact of being a human being, and then the album is a kind of answer to that.”

and I stayed, thinking I would console you
tell you something so pretty that it would have to be true
but I’ll have a lot of letdowns before I learn my worth
and there are no consolations to be had upon the earth

Sam Yield draws on all kinds of things to try to get close to this answer. Personal memories mingle with images of nature (“must be the stillness of the hawk,” goes ‘This Must Be’, “coasting on its dream above your parents’ house in Newark”) and philosophical musings (such as the reference to St Anselm and his ontological argument for the existence of God on ‘Heraclitus’). The album’s title itself refers to the hypothetical southern continent that appeared on European maps from the 16th Century, a notional land that symbolizes both a haven of escape and a bleak and unforgiving void. What Yield describes as “an imagined utopia and also this barren iced-over nothing.”

This imagery comes to the fore on ‘A Winter Country’, the album’s mid- and arguably low-point. It’s an exploration of melancholy, Yield’s near-whispered vocals set against a dense mat of fingerpicked guitar and background banjo as he longs for escape to the south. “I’d like to migrate to a winter country,” he sings. “Terra Australis, land of white flowers.”

From there the album finds a different energy, subtly pivoting toward something less despondent. Take the babbling brook harmonies of ‘Hurricane’ or the sober acceptance of ‘It’s Good To Stand In The Minor Light.’ The sense things have moved on. The understanding that while some wounds never heal, you can learn to carry them a little easier. Nowhere is this feeling more evident than on ‘Jubilee,’ three minutes of benevolent reprieve that refers to the Old Testament occasion of mercy and freedom.

Tomorrow’s coming, but it ain’t here yet
and you were right the time you said
there’s a wage for living and the wage is death
but just for now you have no debts

Terra Australis is out now on Plastic Miracles and available on cassette and digital via the Sam Yield Bandcamp page.

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The idea feels pertinent in These Unprecedented Times, especially when faced with the slew of so-called prescient media. Movies about natural disasters and pandemics, TV shows of protest and violence. Music too, the singles from Protomartyr’s Ultimate Success Today emerging as though timed to fit into the news—disease, death, brutality. But to assign these pieces clairvoyance is to miss the point entirely. The end of the world is not some snap cataclysm. The writing has long been on the wall.

With its apocalyptic imagery and sense of lurking doom, Things I Never Said by Oceanator is another such example. The debut full-length of Elise Okusami, released by Plastic Miracles and Big Scary Monsters, is all the stranger for the fact it was recorded two years ago, delayed by label issues and other problems to eventually be released into a reality as close to its imagined world as we’ve ever witnessed. “There’s a crack in the world,” Okusami sings on a song of the same name. “and we’re all hanging on, hanging on trying not to fall through the void.”

Like the aforementioned Protomartyr record, Things I Never Said is album of endings. It’s there from the opening track, suitably titled ‘Goodbye, Goodnight’. The sense that a chance has been missed, the time for repairs and atonement somewhere in the rear-view. The presiding emotion of ‘A Crack in the World’ is the desertion of tangible answers. “It’s all as confusing as ever,” Okusami sings, “and every day adds something new.” That sense of progression has been lost, things are not destined to improve.

And I’m still trying my best
you know it keeps getting harder and harder every day
when you see the news on the TV, on the radio
but i’ll keep trying to keep the skies blue anyway

Where Oceanator stand apart is in how they choose to direct the energies of this dread. Protomartyr’s Joe Casey, the patron saint of us wry pessimists, finds no way out, but Okusami at least tries, if only to use the approaching dark to accentuate the remaining glimmers of light.  The chaotic rumble of ‘Hide Away’ retreats from the climate’s breakdown, but finds catharsis in the numbered days too. The runaway rhythm of ‘Heartbeat’ finds solace, even joy, in the presence of cherished relationships. As though in returning to the personal there might be some respite.

The cool taut motion of ‘I Would Find You’ goes further still, rising to the challenge of the end to promise compassion and unity in the face of the very worst. This spirit follows through the back half of the album with tracks like ‘Walk With You’, and culminates in ‘Sunshine’, the most positive and determined song on the record. Oceanator suggest that, though there may be no hope in the future, there can be hope in other things. In solidarity, in the present. In dreams if nothing else. And, like Baudrillard’s nightmares made real, who is to say that a strong enough dream, envisioned by enough people, might not come down to us?

Things I Never Said is out now via Plastic Miracles and Big Scary Monsters and is available from the Oceanator Bandcamp page in a variety of formats.

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