EP // Hemlock – Seattle

Post by Misha

I like that a lot more jazz is making its way into bedroom-y lo-fi music (or whatever you want to call this brand of intimately strummed guitar and softly sung words). So much of the genre is very sad music, not only sad in its poetry, but sad sounding. The infusion of jazz elements makes it something different. The melancholy is still there in the story, but it’s a melancholy sway. There’s lilt to it. And some romance.

I also like when a song knows how to put the right amount of distance between its melody and the anxious, muddled human human condition that produced it. So many songs are in a hurry to tell you exactly what they’re about, and how you should feel about it. They are easily described as ‘anthemic’ or ‘mournful’ or ‘carefree’. Not these ones. No part is exactly what it sounds like. On different days Wallingford Bossa could be a slow dance, or a rainy evening indoors, or a sunny nap in the park.

The Bandcamp liner notes read: “Thank goodness for all the places, people, feelings, and ideas that home can be,” and I think that that maybe is the key. All the songs were written (and most were also recorded) in a small basement bedroom in Seattle, but they feel very emotionally nomadic.

As Hemlock meanders between major and minor keys, mixing honey into a whispered earnestness that could otherwise be stinging, with home-recorded hiss coming and going as it pleases, it is easy to choose your own adventure. To go off exploring, to think about home as a journey, to fit the heartwarming into the same musical breath with the heart-wrenching.

Which is to say, these songs are mosaic, making something comfortable and whole out of a hundred scattered moments and dots on a map. The edges of each place and influence is clearly visible in the right light. And that’s true of lots of music, I guess, but the beauty of this record is how the picture shifts and rearranges itself depending upon which pieces you decide to pay attention to.

Buy the EP here.