Cathal Francis – Snowblind | Album Review

/

Self-released

Cathal (pronounced “ka-hill”) Francis lives in Londonderry (or Derry if you’re familiar). Not a small city, but not a massive metropolis, it sits on the river, surrounded by gentle currents of green hills and what I’m assuming are mostly grey skies. I’m telling you this, however, primarily to dash it all away. The background, the landscape, and the imagery can only be found in bits and pieces when zoomed in on Cathal himself. His words, his timbre, his guitar-playing mannerisms —all flashes of his home and city, glimpses of an environment viewed in fleeting succession, like a series of windows down a long hallway. On his latest EP, Snowblind, the 24-year-old walks us down this hallway, not minding the invasive gazes both at him and the scenery.

It feels a touch trite to bring an Elliot Smith comparison to this review, as his work feels largely synonymous with any and all who make quiet tenderness their home, and all the same, Francis’ hearth undoubtedly has that glow. “Severance,” the EPs opening ballad, feels like a gloomy yet bright countryside stroll, and there are more than a few phrases that sonically harken back to the Wolfman himself, but still, Cathal finds his own course. Even with the clear line of influence found on tracks like the strummy hum-along melody that dots the hillsides of “Pattern” or the quiet ballad as soft as ripples on a small pretty loch, ala “Arrangements.” The EP builds its own world and wraps you up in it, but as tender as all the sound and thrum feels, it is very much still an album of despondency.

“Saccharine” launches a dreamy, slow meander through stormclouds brewing soft and sweetly before the cacophonous thunder-crack of its middle section, band joining in at full volume, storming around you as Francis sinks into a deceptively sugary refrain:

Is innocence a dying art?
How do you mend a broken heart?
You fill the void that’s in between
With Phenergan and Sertraline
If love is just a losing game, then why did you give me a name?
All good things come to an end
But that’s okay, ‘cause you’re my friend
Is it saccharine purity or naive immaturity that makes me wake up the way I am?

The hush following his final line feels as expansive, sweeping, and empty as a tempest-battered countryside, bleak and oppressed. 

I've always felt enamored by the singer-songwriter type. From the late great Elliot Smith all the way to the still, mighty, and true Will Sheff, something about a voice and guitar alone feels so powerful while bravely vulnerable all at the same time. Cathal Francis feels green in these ranks, but if there's one thing that the Snowblind EP indicates, it's that he'll be of familiarly kept company soon enough. 

Southern California born and raised, Elias can often be found at the local gig, be it screamo, emo, hardcore, or online @listentohyakkei begging people to listen to the MANS Summer 2007 demo. Their time in the scene is patchwork but their dedication to it and the music that makes it has made up the last few years of their life. They love this shit with the whole of their heart and will talk your ear off about it if you let them. Screamo for fucking ever.

Love your friends. Die laughing.

Apes of the State – What’s Another Night? | Album Review

/

Self-released

When I first heard “Punk Rock Shows in Heaven,” I had to search for Laura online. She had been one of my best friends in high school, and I long had thought she was also trans, so it was no surprise when she came out within a month of us seeing Against Me! at the end of sophomore year. She always said school wasn’t for her, so it also wasn’t a surprise when she dropped out of high school the following year. I didn’t want to lose touch with her, but that’s just the way shit goes when you’re worried about taking the ACT and qualifying for nationals in debate while your friend is in the work force and getting her GED. Life has its way of tearing friends apart when you’re just thinking of yourself. It was a surprise, though, when I heard that she started doing heroin at some point in senior year.

The last time I saw her was in December 2019 at our friend Henry’s wake, only four years after we had graduated. Henry had seizures all the time, and they are what inevitably took him. Laura was good, she was clean, she cried on my shoulder before she had to leave for work. No one I’ve kept in touch with since high school mentioned her in the intervening years, and I hate to admit that I never asked because I was worried the answer would be that she died. 

I wasn’t expecting to think of Laura when I was listening to Apes of the State’s third album, What’s Another Night?, but I had to know after I heard April Hartman’s voice twist like a dagger while singing about her friend’s Bad Brains t-shirt she wears to remember them. All I could think about were Laura’s Misfits and Fear tattoos. 

Apes of the State have always made music about what it means to survive, from the plea to love someone through the pits of desperation on “Strangers” to the nine minutes Hartman dedicates to the internal conflict that accompanies justifying your existence on “Dear Mom.” Now on What’s Another Night?, Apes of the State is concerned about honoring their friends, those who’ve made it this far, and especially those who haven’t. 

Throughout What’s Another Night?, Hartman draws on the dissonance of missing the “good old days” and knowing you can never go back there. The folk-pop-punk of “I’m Okay!” and both parts of “Hot Summer Night” draw me back to a memory of the night before junior year when all my friends were at Henry’s house, when we snuck out at 1 a.m. and wandered his neighborhood until we saw a loose street sign pole leaning on the concrete divider ahead of a roundabout when I accidentally pulled it out of the ground when I was just testing to see how stable it was when we all looked at each other before running back to Henry’s house with our shirts off because we had slung them around the pole so we could carry it by the ends of our shirts instead of covering it with our fingerprints when we got to Henry’s house he grabbed his tools and we took the “keep right of divider” sign off when ran the pole back to the roundabout and laid it next to it’s hole in the ground when the next morning while Laura was driving me home we went towards the roundabout and saw a guy from the fire department parked next to the stripped sign writing on a notepad and I just knew when he looked at us he could tell we did it, and when I’m finished reminiscing about that night, I’m reminded of the photo of Henry in a t-shirt with a skateboarding cat propped next to his casket. Things are easier when you’re teenage punks, when your biggest worry is asking your mom for money to get Chipotle while you’re skating 12 miles to the nearest mall. Things are easier before time has definite boundaries and you feel invincible.

But that’s where the hymns of remembrance that make up this record find their strength, in the fact that “time keeps moving forwards even though there is no way of knowing what direction I am facing.” What else is there to do but to keep going, to hope and work towards a better future?

What’s Another Night? isn’t just a set of songs remembering departed friends – it is those moments that Hartman directs to the people still with us that are my favorite on the record. I love the moment on “Little Things” when she so sincerely sings, “and to my friends who are here with me / I’m not saying let’s take life seriously / but I’m serious about you staying alive.” Truthfully, the scariest thing to me about being trans is the reality that all of my trans friends’ lives are made precarious by the disdain we face for existing. There are so many confounding variables in life that I worry I don’t show my love and care for my people enough, like Hartman admits on “Best Friends” or “Round 2” (an acoustic rerecording of the acapella “Fight Song” from Pipe Dream) when she sings, “sorry that I haven’t called you back / I’ve been busy trying not to lose my shit.” I know I am often a shitty fucking friend, I’m the type of girl to put her foot in her mouth with an ill timed joke, but that’s what makes me so grateful my friends still love me. Like Hartman sings, “I promise that I’m working on it.”

I’m worried that it was never clear how much I loved Laura. Right after I came out, I realized Laura didn’t know I was trans too. I’m sure she suspected it, though. Around that time, I found her Instagram account and requested to follow her. That was the first thing I checked when I was listening to “Punk Rock Shows in Heaven,” but three years later, that request is still pending.

When I Googled Laura, I misspelled her last name, but still, there she was. The top result was the page for her wedding in November. There was that close-lipped smile I knew, and a black beanie like always. I saw her holding her fiancée in her arms as Hartman sang “tell the kids that are hooked on heroin / we found a way down here to cope without that.” 

I’m happy that even though we weren’t facing the same way, we both moved forward with the time for another night.

Names in this review have been changed for the sake of privacy.

Lillian Weber is a fake librarian in NYC. She writes about gender, music, and other inane thoughts on her substack, all my selves aligned. You can follow her burner account on twitter @Lilymweber.

Beauty Saloon – BS | Album Review

/

Self-Released

By the time you finish reading this sentence, Beauty Saloon may have already broken up. The on-again-off-again Chicago group has been relaxing under the radar for over a year and a half, quietly assembling the pieces of their debut album, the cheekily-titled and almost eponymous BS. Singer-songwriter and guitarist Michael Molitor believes the band’s lifespan from here on out hangs in the balance, uncertain if the Saloon’s hours are up, but the release of their possibly sole LP acts as a celebration of progress, a document of a post-pandemic upstart band delivering everything they have to offer. Looking at the album’s track listing, BS may initially seem like a compilation or unfinished fragments of a more holistic project, but it all culminates in a complete listening experience that clearly delivers on the band’s intentions.

There is a wide range of influences that weave in and out of each song, starting with “What Are You Made Of? (Milk!),” which is immediately reminiscent of the quirkier sides of alternative music, such as Beat Happening, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Cheekface. The shimmering melodies and jangly guitars let the song sit nicely somewhere between emo and unfuzzed shoegaze, all with a ripping alt-country guitar solo to boot. Molitor’s vocals are restrained and captivatingly boyish, sifting on top of the music as another instrument in the mix. “Zelda” is a twangy, strummy ballad that almost sounds like a performance of a ‘60s Bee Gees soul song played three rooms away – smooth with a magnetic subtlety.

If you were a fan of MJ Lenderman’s seemingly nonsensical lyrics on Manning Fireworks, you’ll enjoy the fast food odyssey of “Dial Up,” Beauty Saloon’s opus clocking in at just under six minutes. This is one of a few tracks written by second guitarist Austin Rose but sung by Molitor, who handles it with the care the words deserve. I don’t mean to call this song “nonsense,” but there’s a lot about it that channels the spirit of a track like Lenderman’s “Rip Torn,” where Rose recalls, “When I was a child, maybe seventeen, me and my old man went down to Burger King. And we went to Popeye’s Chicken too, no, our dogs and our cats can’t eat that kind of food.” Following the end of that verse is a sprawling instrumental passage that encompasses a variety of different flavors, much like a Whopper and a classic chicken sandwich.

Rose’s other writing credits include “Pickups,” his only lead vocal on the album, complete with a backing track that sounds like a beachy b-side from Kings Of Leon’s Come Around Sundown, but less familial rock and roll and more slacker whammy bar worship. There’s a nice addition of cello performed by Chaepter Gottschalk, who glides along nicely with the rest of the band, and Rose has a great call to Molitor’s guitar solo á là Poison’s “Talk Dirty To Me.” Lead single “No One to Feed” is the third Rose writing credit and the third of four songs on BS that leans into a food theme, one that I suspect is unintentional overall but creates a fun throughline across the album’s duration. The groove, along with Molitor’s vocals, makes it sound like Elliott Smith at the not-O.K. Corral, a tear-in-your-beer tune turned tender for tongue-in-cheek tattooed millennials. The track is preceded by the album’s briefest moment, “Feels Good To Be Invited,” which could have been plucked from any of the classic, pre-insurrection Ariel Pink albums.

The second half of BS dips into the band’s slightly older material and recontextualizes it for an album presentation. Molitor rocks “Bassoon Girl” like a mix of Ram-era McCartney and early Springsteen, with more fun lyrics that could have come from an old Sparks album: “And I still hear the bassoon rushing over it all… and I ain’t got no hearing problems.” The song originally appeared on their first EP of demos in 2022, although interestingly, the three demos that follow on BS are previously unreleased. “Sugarbear Honeypie” is as sweet and mushy as the title suggests, but holy shit does Beauty Saloon put together one of the prettiest ballads I’ve heard this decade. The harmonized falsetto group vocals over the guitar arpeggios dance beautifully with each other and make the track sound like a generationally passed-down lullaby. “Can’t Keep Love Around (Dopamine Dragon)” is a lo-fi Kurt Vile-esque laidback rocker, and it would have been cool to see what the band could have done with it as a proper studio track, but this demo version gives it a particular personality.

“Liza Minnelli,” the band’s first proper single from 2023, closes out BS in an alternate, live-in-studio version, and is a nice button on the LP and the band overall. Listening to Beauty Saloon take one of their more popular early tracks and letting it ring out as the final moments on their first album gives a feeling of completion, like the band has served its purpose, and the next chapters are going to begin. It’s their encore performance before the bow, just like Minnelli herself would give.

Beauty Saloon’s brief period in the Chicago indiesphere could have been glossed over entirely, leaving them a memory of a memory of a band, but their work on BS shows them coming together and leaving their mark, reminding us locals of the special brand of DIY music they had to offer. And who knows, by the time you finish reading this sentence, Beauty Saloon may have already reunited. 

Logan Archer Mounts once almost got kicked out of Warped Tour for doing the Disturbed scream during a band’s acoustic set. He currently lives in Rolling Meadows, IL, but tells everyone he lives in Palatine.

Eliana Glass – E | Album Review

/

Shelter Press

A sea of mahogany scrolls meets my widening eyes as richly shimmering instruments catch the hot sun that pours through the windows like water. 

It was the summer before my senior year of high school, and I was at a music camp smack dab in the middle of the sweltering southern California desert. Shy, awkward, and frumpy, I was among more peers than I had ever been before. As you can imagine, I felt like a fish out of water. I was there to attend the piano program, but campers were also given the chance to explore other instruments during the camp. I eagerly signed up for the strings class, having never had the opportunity to try any instruments besides the piano. 

The moment I entered the strings classroom is one I will remember forever. Everything changed for me that day as I pulled one of the massive upright basses into my arms, timidly plucking at the thick, ropey strings and startling as the vibration rattled through my ribcage. I was in love. 

Fast forward a year to 2012: it was my freshman year of college, and I had the opportunity to take four semesters of a group strings class as part of my piano major. Obviously, the piano, being my primary point of study, was my whole world, however, I was still deeply excited to reunite with the instrument that had intrigued me for the past year. I threw myself into every class period with vigor and enthusiasm. I even continued with private lessons during my senior year, playing whatever bass I could find lying around the music building in the few moments of free time I had during the week. Learning to play the upright bass developed in me a love and appreciation for genres and pieces of music that I believe I would have found far less accessible prior. I developed an ear for jazz, ever in awe of those bassists whose fingers could flit over the unforgiving strings like sparrows. I loved the mumbling runs and satisfying slap of pizzicato. I found joy in the husky whisper of the heavy bow as my little fingers scuttled across the fingerboard. Combined with my love for and dedication to the piano, I had huge new worlds and perspectives offered to me through the bass.

It is with this love for the upright bass and the piano that I approached Eliana Glass’s debut album, E. This modern jazz masterpiece is a stunning example of the delicate balance that can be struck between diametrically opposed instruments. Each track is unhurried, savoring the meandering harmonies and giving them permission to meld into a colorful blur of sound. Glass’s rich and elegant vocals have a resonant and woody quality, floating above the gentle rhythm of each song’s slightly varied instrumentation. 

I have listened through this album countless times, and it still presents me with something new each time - a new shadow, a new sunbeam, a new feeling. While I am comfortable with the ebb and flow of jazz harmony, having done more than my fair share of listening over the years, Eliana Glass has mastered her own unique brand of harmonic progression. It is at once listenable and fresh, full of subtle surprises and satisfying progressions that keep me coming back to listen once again. 

Glass’s musical career is impressive, and well explains her prowess as a musician and composer. From first learning the piano by ear as a child to studying jazz voice at The New School, followed by years of performance and songwriting experience, Eliana’s abilities have continued to evolve with time. Her composing draws on her thorough knowledge of jazz standards and love for Brazilian music, improvisation, and vintage equipment. While most of her writing features piano, upright bass, and drums, some pieces are stripped down to just Glass and a piano, and others feature warm and weird synths. 

My favorite track on E is “Flood.” It feels almost improvisatory in nature, something that would have been written alone one evening, hummed and tenderly pieced together by candlelight. The chord progression is heart-wrenching: simple arpeggios modulate between the major, its relative minor, and the secondary dominant, leading the ear on a sonically unstable journey that is nonetheless wonderfully satisfying. The tragic lyrics are intoned in Glass’s husky low register at first, sitting beautifully in her chest voice. As the song progresses, she switches to her head voice, and I am reminded of a theremin or bowed saw: Eliana sounds otherworldly and ethereal, hovering above the piano like a phantom. Another highlight is the opening track, “All My Life,” which feels deliciously like a song from a bygone era. The rich seventh chords, beautiful jazz progressions, and thrumming bass pizzicato create a romantic and brooding setting for Glass’s stunning vocals. “I’ve waited for you all my life - all my life, I’ve waited for you,” she croons. “Give me back my life, those stars are mine, this life is mine / Stars in the sky, this life is mine.” Somehow, “All My Life” does sound like stars: evoking a deep velvet evening sky, held against the heavens by glittering stars. 

A particularly standout work on this album is “Human Dust,” which is based on a poem by Agnes Denes. I have actually had the opportunity to see this work in person, as it was acquired by the San Francisco MoMA as part of their permanent collection in 2013 on a rotating display schedule. The piece consists of the poem, which hangs on the wall, and a small glass container of “calcareous human remains.” (So yes, bits and pieces of bones.) The poem tells the story of the life of a decidedly average man, chronicling how long he lived, how many people loved him, how many pounds of bread he ate, and so on. It is an eerie, deeply thoughtful work, and Glass pays Denes’ art piece the homage it deserves with her rendition. One can see the parallels between these two visionary artists: both Denes and Glass are pushing the boundaries of their respective crafts. While one works in physical media and the latter in sonic forms, both are confronting what it means to be a contemporary artist. There is no better person to tackle the challenge that Denes’ poem presents than Eliana Glass.

The modern listener would be remiss to pass over the masterpiece that is E. Full of stunning and fresh original pieces alongside well-crafted covers, Eliana Glass’s abilities are on full display. Each piece spins in orbit around the artist like a glowing moon, reflecting the cohesive beauty that this artist is so skilled in creating. And I, for one, will watch the moons, stars, and planets of E’s delicate solar system whirl above me over and over again.

Britta Joseph is a musician and artist who, when she isn’t listening to records or deep-diving emo archives on the internet, enjoys writing poetry, reading existential literature, and a good iced matcha. You can find her on Instagram @brittajoes.

Colin Miller – Losin' | Album Review

/

Mtn Laurel Recording Co.

The first time I ever saw Colin Miller, he was sitting on a riding mower, kind of like a lawn chair and kind of like a throne. This wasn’t the first time I had heard his name, though. No, the first time I ever heard Colin Miller’s name was when he was introduced during the live rendition of “You Are Every Girl To Me” on MJ Lenderman’s album And the Wind (Live and Loose!). Toward the end of the Jackass-indebted love song, the group launches into an instrumental jam that allows Jake Lenderman to do a roll call of his band, the titular Wind. Lenderman’s voice kind of lulls as he calls out Miller, looping around the L’s and playfully drawing out the R in his drummer’s last name. It wasn’t until Zach Romeo’s documentary Rat Bastards of Haw Creek that I finally put a face to the name.

Rat Bastards of Haw Creek is a film about the rock band Wednesday, but it’s also secretly a preservative study of Haw Creek, the pastoral slice of North Carolina countryside that several members of Wednesday lived and recorded music on before they were evicted this past year. In his mini-doc, Romeo depicts this home through alternating shots of broken-down trucks, abandoned grills, worn-down sheds covered in ivy, and lush fields dotted with low white houses that blend into the landscape. With this footage and the accompanying interviews about living there, Romeo created a poignant portrait of a place that no longer exists.

We may only be halfway through the decade, but it already feels indisputable that alternative country is the sound of 2020’s indie, with the twinkle of pedal steel becoming what feels like a requirement for rock credibility these days. There are lots of intangibles in this Country takeover (which I wrote about in the second issue of Portable Model), but one tangible reason for this sound is Colin Miller, who has been at the periphery of this scene working as collaborator, creator, and contributor to some of the most buzzed-about records of the past few years. 

Tucked away in the idyllic greenery of Haw Creek, several of the biggest alt-country debuts of the past decade were produced in those low white houses with Miller’s support. Indigo De Souza’s, I Love My Mom, Wednesday’s I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone, and MJ Lenderman’s self-titled album were all recorded in the walls of Miller’s home. This isn’t including the countless other artists that Miller was producing up until his last day on the property. This also isn't counting the number of songs simply inspired by living in Haw Creek, depicting the lives of the people who populated this space.

These alt-country stars all ended up here because Miller had inadvertently built a thriving artistic community in East Asheville thanks to Gary King, the beloved owner of the Haw Creek property. King’s low rent, affable personality, and familial-like support for these artists resulted in the creation of entire songs, albums, and discographies. In the words of Miller, “Every part of the music process benefits from livin’ in a place like this.” 

Photo by Charlie Boss

But he doesn’t live there anymore. In 2022, after years as the de facto caretaker of Gary King and his land, watching NASCAR with him and mowing his lawn, King passed away, and his land was sold. In the years between his death and the official sale of the property, Miller tasked himself with maintaining Haw Creek’s magic in King’s absence, even buying Powerball tickets and scratch-offs with the hopes of winning enough to keep his home. 

This is all captured on Colin Miller's sun-faded sophomore album, Losin', both explicitly and implicitly. While some songs call directly to distinct moments, open in their mourning, the whole album is tinged with melancholia as Miller stubbornly pushes through his permanently changed life. The fuzzy melodies and ambient soundscapes of the album, combined with Miller’s unflinching misery, create a lightly haunted feeling that envelops the record, not in a literal ghostly sense, but rather in the way that life is constantly permeated by the presence of others, and once they are gone, the unrelenting memories remain. Through Miller’s signature North Carolina twang, Losin' is an album that is dogged in its sadness and stubborn in its acceptance of change.

“Birdhouse” kicks the record off with a woozy bent guitar lick and Miller laying out the pragmatic lyric, "If I stay here, I will die in silence here." Not exactly the typical place for an album about grief to start, but this is clearly the rumination of someone who has been dealing with grief and its effects for an extended period and is ready for tough change. This is the driving kinetic energy of the album: the want and need to live with loss, not disappear in it. Musically, there’s a porch-like quality to this song, as if its bright, bittersweet chords were first strummed while facing the sun despite the heartbroken words sung against it. Miller’s grief is lived-in and constant, palpable even on the best summer days.

There’s a hypnotic nature to Miller’s sound, and “4 Wheeler,” which starts with a line about robotripping, feels like hazy dreams appearing and disappearing in a thick country fog. Miller suddenly turns the blame on himself, repeating the refrain, “I can’t get to you.” In the final tragic moments of the track, an out-of-tune woodwind winds its way through Miller’s ambient sound and desperate repetition. The album is full of moments like this: a stray guitar pluck, a small riff on the keys, a faraway horn, soaring and sinking pedal steel. Behind these instruments are Miller’s friends, Jake Lenderman, who took over Miller’s usual space behind the drum kit, Xandy Chelmis, alt-country’s most prolific pedal steel player, and Ethan Baechtold, who holds it all together with his bass and keys. After all, his friends were inspired by Haw Creek and mourn Gary King, too.

Miller’s lyrics are sparsely placed throughout his songs, and the words themselves are minimal, focused on capturing a specific feeling rather than recalling an autobiographical scene. In “Porchlight,” Miller makes sense of the collapse of a relationship. Lyrics like the lamenting “I found a stranger’s boots in the living room” and the helplessly romantic “Darlin, you know you’re still my number one tube top angel” evoke a heartbroken strand of loneliness. While the lyrics are minimal, the sound is not – Miller traded his distortion at the door for a looser instrumentation. You can almost hear the cicadas chirping in the back of the track.

Cars, both driving them and watching them rust, are a constant reference for Miller throughout Losin', with most songs referencing different vehicles’ comfort, decay, or association with loved ones. The lead single, “Cadillac,” is the most straightforward in its metaphor, named after King’s favorite kind of car. This song was reviewed for Swim Into The Sound earlier in this album cycle, and in his review, Taylor Grimes notes the honest depiction Miller recalls of King, naming oxygen tanks, lazy eyes, and fake teeth. This is an incredibly vivid description woven over pedal steel.

Despite the clear grief and loss on display, the song floats by as an easy listen, light and breezy, the perfect soundtrack as the Carolinas warm up for the spring. By the end of the track, Miller lays out the stakes in the most plainspoken of terms: “It’s a good day at the wreck yard / It’s a bad day for my heart.”

If the other songs were Miller imagining cars that can’t move fast enough, “Hasbeen” is Miller with his pedal to the metal. Clocking in at under two minutes, this is the fastest song on Losin', and it zips past the sun-bleached tracklist, exhaust left in its wake. The track gains momentum as it powers on, charged by Lenderman’s kick drum. I imagine the greenery of the North Carolina hills sweeping past a car window. Lyrically, Miller likens himself to a rusting car or an aging athlete, with the capacity to rebuild with help from others; it’s wavering but hopeful. However, like a deer had leapt into the road, the whole song comes to a screeching halt as Miller repeats and pleads, “Was that you?” 

These songs feel threadbare, acting as bearers of Miller’s lamentation first, songs second. With needle-thin pedal steel warble wrapping around his words in “I Need a Friend,” Miller suggests, “Maybe I just needed / To be the one / Who leaves first.” His sad assuredness in “Birdhouse” returns in “Little Devil” as he promises, “I ain’t gonna waste your time, you ain’t gonna waste mine.” Sonically, the back half of the album moves away from the more country-flavored sound of the opening tracks and into a twang-tinged distortion. 

“Lost Again” begins with a shuffling drum machine loop, building with keys and strings and the pedal steel’s whine before Miller’s distorted voice, almost buried by the instruments, sings, “I don’t need another Christmas morning / I don’t need another birthday picture cake / I just need you here for a second.” It’s in this buzzy orchestration that Miller lets his heart beat out of his chest, his honesty humming alongside the bassline as he tries to bargain for one more glimpse at a friend. While other songs on Losin' depict Miller trying to stitch his grief into his life, “Lost Again” has a distinct air of distress, like an unexpected reminder of who you lost interrupting your day. Miller is raw in his anguish as he begs, “So excuse me for lookin’ like I lost my best friend.” The car imagery returns in crushing lines like, “Just tearin’ up in your muscle car / No one’s watching for my headlights now,” which makes his loneliness palpable. A couple lines later, Miller lays out, “And no Ford Mustang will drag you back to me / Who, yeah, who will dance at my next wedding?” simultaneously accepting loss while dreading imagining a life of joyful moments without a loved one.

The album ends with “Thunder Road,” a song that feels like the pressure that builds under your eyes when you’re on the verge of tears. But the emotion driving those tears changes. The opening lyric, “Singin’ Thunder Road karaoke to a disco ball that won’t spin,” devastated me, yet I crack a smile whenever I hear the start of the next verse: “In a cul-de-sac, with a potato gun / Decapitating dead end signs.” It’s a goofy reminder to let the good wash over you, not just the sadness. Like much of this album, this song roots itself in the present, weary of nostalgia and focusing purely on scenes of memories. “Thunder Road” is lyrically reminiscent of a scrapbook, tasking the music to match Miller’s sun-soaked hope. In the final moments, Lenderman's rhythm fades away, leaving Chelmis’ pedal steel and Baechtold’s keys to sing with Miller’s words and acoustic strumming. The album ends on that same bright bitterness it started on, but it’s different now: better, lighter, and freer with everything out in the open.

Haw Creek, as immortalized in these songs, doesn’t exist anymore, both in the artistic and literal sense. While the land was sold in the years prior, in September 2024, Hurricane Helene’s unprecedented storm surge flooded the mountainous region of North Carolina the neighborhood stood in and quite literally washed the entrance away. Back in his 2023 interview in Rat Bastards of Haw Creek, Miller said, “I think it’s our favorite place in the world,” but in a recent interview, after the landscape was left emotionally and physically unrecognizable, Miller said, “It feels haunted.” While its influence will live on, Losin' is effectively a bookend to the original Haw Creek sound. 

In Losin', Colin Miller memorialized a time and place that may not exist anymore but continues to live on in his words and twang. Losin' is not about getting over your grief; it’s about the opposite — living with it, seeing it in the sunrise and the sunset, weaving it into quilts, and smelling it in gasoline. Grief is in everything, like coffee, dentures, Pall Malls, muscle cars, and familiar tree lines, and since it’s so ubiquitous, that means loss happens over and over, again and again, every time a memory strikes. Accepting the circadian rhythm of grief is difficult but necessary. Things will never be the same; how could they? But that’s okay. 

Caro Alt (she/her) is from New Orleans, Louisiana, and if she could be anyone in The Simpsons, she would be Milhouse.