His new album, Guppy, definitely falls into the latter category, an album of lush ambient music bookended with genre-bending tracks which hint at Shaw’s thinking. Opener ‘Pride Of Canada’ is the first, an industrial-sounding song of shambling drums and throbbing noise which swells toward what are pretty much the only vocals on the album, with Shaw sounding pretty defeated and self-loathing:

“I don’t know what I should do
with all this great potential,
I’ll probably piss it up the wall
and claim artistic intention.

“I don’t know who I should blame
for all my bad decisions,
there’s so many, they’re all such dicks
I haven’t time for this.”

‘Palette Cleanser (So’s Your Face)’ begins with whirling strings which slowly subside into a single furious whine. This is eventually joined by warm drones akin to those on Lejsovka & Freund’s Mold on Canvas, before falling victim to distorted buzzes and the concluding sounds of haunted piano and poltergeistic percussion. The drones grow again into ‘Pylon Pile-On’, which we described in our preview as “something comfortably sad and vividly alive, like watching rain fall onto a city from the window of a train”. This mood is interrupted comically by the retro shampoo ad on ‘Good Arrows’ (“Everyone knows that beautiful hair makes a girl look beautiful!”), as if your view from the train is broken by the empty promises of billboards. The track evolves into a Trouble Books-y song of spacey electronics and background noises which sounds like vocals either ancient or alien or both. The conclusion features the disembodied voice from a vintage radio programme, playing on a loop like a broken museum exhibit, gradually fading behind the noise like the ever decreasing echoes of a history slipping to the back of public consciousness.

“Coal mines and slag heaps, narrow cobbled alleyways and ugly rows of back to back houses”

The next few tracks continue the memory theme. ‘Hell’s Teeth’ is a low deep hum adorned with minimal piano and a field recording of people chatting, with wobbles with bursts of noise like something from a horror soundtrack, as if a troubled mind is trying and failing to look back with rose-tinted glasses. ‘Dreams of Fields (Cows)’ opens with what can only be described as a weird little squelchy froggy noise, before muffled piano carries the track through flitting electronics and dripping water and an insectile hum. The damp imagery continues with ‘Fishing with Dad (No Dad)’, a track which buzzes with life yet still sounds distant, the musical equivalent of looking back at old photos and crying with equal parts fondness and regret, amazed at how you managed to bumble through life taking everything you had for granted.

As if acknowledging the emotional turmoil across the record, second bookend ‘Not Today, Satan’ is built around a voice, omniscient and semi-robotic but also kind-sounding. Like one of those disarmingly sincere internet scams, the voice is hugely compelling despite setting off major alarm bells in the cynical part of your brain, tempting you into believing everything can be solved without time or pain or effort by one magical arrangement of words.

“Let’s clear the air about some certain things, let’s talk heart to heart. Are you saying to yourself, just about now, ‘I can’t change, I’ve tried and tried many times but failed. There’s something terribly wrong with me that makes me different form other people. There’s a deep dark secret that keeps me from being a total person’. Let me clue you into something, my dear friend. Everyone has something wrong with them, whether it be drinking, or drugs, or perversion. Now listen very closely because I’m going to say something very imp-”

Guppy is about being human, an album which tries to provide instinctive answers to unanswerable questions. Or rather, one which formulates the human-questions correctly, allowing the creator (and, by proxy, us) to transcend their bifocal, street-level view, their smallness, to look down on things from a comfortable position, making the absurd, confusing and overwhelming world become, for the shortest of whiles, knowable. The result (for the creator and us both) is a weird sense of attachment to our situations, a form of nostalgia for a life never easy but uniquely ours, that feeling of calm wonder which visits all too rarely (when driving home after a happy family gathering or watching a foreign sunset) where some semblance of context is achieved and a strange joy is found in melancholy. We know we have to go back down, but for now at least, that is okay.

Guppy is out now on Kirigirisu Recordings, and you can buy in now from Bandcamp.

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A similar thing happens whenever an artist you particularly like releases new work. Much of the appreciation a listener/reader/viewer feels is based around this connection with the artist, a sense that the person sees the world in a similar way. Anything that reinforces this relationship feels like a confirmation. This person really does think like me.

And so we (finally) get to the review. Timothy Showalter’s Strand of Oaks is one of my musical equivalents of Don DeLillo. His previous albums Leave Ruin, Pope Killdragon and Dark Shores have all, to varying degrees, been important to me, and I have waited for the new album, HEAL, with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, especially given Showalter’s comments in interviews that he didn’t like Dark Shores. [Did the fact that he didn’t like what I liked mean I wouldn’t like what he did? Was the connection going to be broken?]

Despite the music of Strand of Oaks always confronting various issues and problems, so far it has often been through the use of metaphor or fantastical settings (Dark Shores centred around space as a symbol for isolation and loneliness, Leave Ruin had a love affair between a priest and nun, Pope Killdragon had giants and Dan Aykroyd and the ghost of John Kennedy). With HEAL, Showalter stated that he was going to more direct, stating explicitly the things that were causing him grief.

The album’s opening track, ‘Goshen ’97,’ serves as a prelude to Showalter’s strife, a childhood where he was ’rotting in the basement’ before he was ‘fat, drunk and mean,’ with ‘everything [see: trouble] still out ahead.’ It’s a great description of growing up in the 90s that’s infused with a positivity and longing that I associate with thoughts of childhood.

By the second track, the real problems have hit and the lyrics are sort of looking backwards, the refrain coming across as Present Day Showalter instructing Ground Zero Showalter. ’You gotta heal’ he insists over and over, suggesting that while destruction and self-harm might feel good, they can never be helpful in the long run. The rest of the album continues this mix of anguish and hope, with (very) loud, almost metal-esque guitars, Showalter’s distinctive vocals proving the perfect vessel.

‘Shut In’ captures a sense of isolation/hopelessness without the need for any space metaphors, stating “I was born in the middle, made it too late, everything good had been made.” ‘Mirage Year’ confronts his wife’s affair in stark detail “He asked you about movies, he asked about your day, you showed him in the mirror what was ours.” ‘For Me’ sees the guitars turned up for a song that boils and boils before bubbling over with the desperate refrain “and the sun fell right out of the sky.” ‘JM’ is the current stand out track, a mammoth midway point which serves as a tribute to the late, great Jason Molina. Showalter describes numerous negative scenarios and feelings (with little Molina references scattered around), capping each off with the refrain ’I had your sweet tunes to play.’ Molina helped him through, Molina healed him. This offers a nice parallel to what I said about the importance of artists, and it reinforces that sense of connection for the listener. Showalter has turned to music in order to feel a little less alone too. This person really does think like me.

Reading these descriptions you might expect the album to be an angry one. Catharsis through rage, antagonistic and dark and unforgiving. But what makes the album special is how the situations and emotions described are not portrayed as simple, clear-cut things. Yes he is angry, but he is also sad and frustrated and loving. He’s ashamed yet defiant, nostalgic but glad to have moved on. It is Her fault but also His. All great art attempts to describe the paradoxes and double binds of existence, because to attribute binary descriptions of our circumstances and emotions is to flatten the very best things about being human. Showalter’s comments in the press release from label Dead Oceans sums this up nicely:

“There’s an uncertainty to ‘HEAL’ that makes me nervous and excited at the same time. It’s sad, but it sounds like a celebration, like I’m crying and laughing and sticking both middle fingers in the air all at the same time.”

HEAL is out now via Dead Oceans, and you can buy it here.

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Dark Shores is an album about space. According to various interviews it began as a concept about space exploration and wars but the human element came to the fore. The album is still influenced by space, but rather than flying saucers and lasers, the ‘space’ here is an empty vacuum, the ultimate isolation. From the opener ‘Diamond Drill’, with a closing refrain echoing ‘Its a lonely life’, you realise the album is not going to be the most upbeat listen. ‘Satellite Moon’ and ‘Dark Shores’ further the imagery of space as emptiness. ‘Maureen’s’ and ‘Little Wishes’ are full of the same hope and regret that made ’Bonfire’ so enthralling. ‘Last Grains’, a song set in a not-so hard to imagine broken future about just that, is quick and desperate, capturing perfectly the antinomic pressures put on modern persons juggling family, employment and social status. ‘Trap Door’ clings to a chink of light in darkness. These are songs crafted carefully to entwine the fantastic and the recognisable, perfect examples of his paradoxical use of fantasy to portray reality.

Showalter is not afraid to change his sound to suit the stories they tell. The early version of ‘Spacestations’, recorded for the brilliant Shaking Through series, was packed with epic synths and was worlds away (no pun intended) from the acoustic singer-songwriters he is often compared with. Since, the song has been striped back, synths replaced with a more familiar guitar, but the switch highlighted just how versatile Showalter can be. Leave Ruin was classic folk strumming, Pope Killdragon experimented with metal-tinged noise, and now we have sci-fi synths and succinct rock. His voice and lyrics would be effective against any musical backdrop and Strand of Oaks can therefore go in any direction. I for one cannot wait to follow.

Buy Dark Shores on CD from Ten Atoms or digitally via Bandcamp.

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