Darlingside New Album + Fall Tour Dates

everything is alive, Darlingside‘s fourth LP marks a subtle but notable departure for the Boston-based quartet NPR, once described as “exquisitely arranged, literary-minded, baroque-folk-pop.” . The album retains much of the richness and sophistication of Extralife (2018) and Fish Pond Fish (2020), but the band’s latest release brings out the individual voices of the four songwriters. decisively clarified and differentiated. It’s a bold reinvention of a group known for their ubiquitous vocal harmonies. . With personal and universal change, domestic and existential hardships, Everything Is Alive is an album about loss and the struggle for a veneer of redemption.

Comprised of four like-minded multi-instrumentalists who first met at Williams College in 2009, Don Mitchell, Auyoung Mukherzi, Harris Paseltiner, and David Senft, Darlingside’s career has been a testament to their songwriting. It has been defined by the grace and unity of the four voices. Their harmonious and melodic world-building talents have garnered praise from media outlets such as NPR, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker, and are some of the factors that have created worldwide demand for their extraordinary live performances. In other words, beautifully depersonalizing has worked very well for Darling Side in the past. With a dynamism and discipline more common to graduate-level composition workshops than indie rock, Darlingside has worked for years to enhance and sustain a truly democratic process of songwriting, one involving multiple group rounds. have experimented with all sorts of peculiar methods of All the writing and recording exercises are meant to escape the traps that multiple songwriter bands tend to fall into: ego-driven infighting and artistic incoherence.

So in Everything Is Alive, Darlingside is taking a risk. Tweaked by the restrictions created by pandemic quarantines and other more spontaneous catalysts, the album was produced and recorded by the band, Tucker Martin (My Morning Jacket, Sufjan Stevens, Iron & Wine), which sustains each member’s individual voice in a way never before possible. Where harmony once formed a hard-won sonic unity, Everything Is Alive shows four singers alternating (more or less) from song to song, and this approach It gives the listener a sense of personal ownership and thus brings a new level of musicality. Intimacy and nuance.

Don’t get me wrong. Everything Is Alive is still a collaborative effort. As with Extralife and Fish Pond Fish, many meticulous rituals and practices are incorporated into this work. The difference here is that the band are giving themselves permission to dig new depths and add extra dimensions to an already highly tuned aesthetic. And the results are compelling not only by the intimacy itself, but by the way such intimacy is contrasted or juxtaposed with Darlingside’s trademark lusciousness. The enveloping harmonies still linger, like the amazing (mostly) a cappella “How Long Again.” There are also textural polyrhythms, infectious body percussion, a triumphant horn section that enhances the earworm-like chorus of “Baking Soda,” and a solemn cello that lifts the heartbreaking emotions of “Lose The Keys.” The quartet is also left. The difference is that on Everything Is Alive, these moments are set against a quieter, contrasting depth of loneliness and vulnerability.

As such, Everything Is Alive, which kicked off in 2021, looks like a continuation of 2020’s Fish Pond Fish. Probably a sequel. The second half of the Corona double album. Whereas “Fish Pond Fish” built a lush sonic landscape around vibrant imagery of wool-picking, picking fruit and going home, “Everything Is Alive” We face many challenges that arise when ‘I’m finally home’ becomes ‘Dear God, when will I be free from this situation? Stagnation and sadness? Lose the keys, lose the marbles, lose the parents / Lose the numbers, lose the plot / All that matters is losing / Won’t Mitchell sing on “Lose the Keys”? Elsewhere we encounter images of circling, domestic dissatisfaction, and shamelessly crumbling, all of which serve as an awareness of the despair that must be faced before salvation is possible. . “Are you coming out of the darkness soon?” Senft asks about “Can’t Help Falling Apart.” The song turned out to be the catalyst for Senft’s realization that he could not continue as a touring member of the band.

Elsewhere on the album, such as the opening track “Green Light,” a tendency to retreat into the self is refuted by an attempt to discern the small but visible glory of the world before us. The song meditates on the subtle beauty in (seemingly) drab things like sidewalks, concrete and rust. Based on an iPhone note strumming a mandocello, “Green Light” is notable for another reason. It’s unlike any song Darlingside has done before in its mantra-like worldliness. Reminiscent of ‘Within You Without You’-era George Harrison, the song is a creative leap in its own right, and marks the unexplored territory the album as a whole is about to explore.

Everything Is Alive is full of vivid imagery and memorable phrasal turns. It’s common for expectations to flip or explode, like the next line in “All The Lights In The City.” It explodes strangely with nuances, but it explodes the same. Working may be what keeps us alive. Or maybe it lives/The sky always hangs blue Above the clouds/But the road without resistance will wear you out. On the track “Sea Dogs,” which contains the album’s title, Paseltiner sings to a bouncy dreamscape: I can’t get up all the time / I can’t get up even half the time / On time I can’t even get up Lines like this express the disorientation and hopelessness that permeates this album. Yet, later in the same song, the song’s dreamy-sounding context and heart-wrenching lines emerge. When the sea dogs are above the clouds/And the kites and the big white basketball/The backyard is getting thicker/How’s it going/Everything’s so alive/Alive, alive. ‘Sea Dogs’ is both the album’s theme and a bridge to Fish Pond Fish, revising the album’s motif about nature as a reflection of the self, nature fully escaping or transcending its own limits. I’m asking if it’s also a means to do.

It is rare and becoming rarer by the day. A group of musicians with an emulsifying magic that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. And seeing Darlingside perform live confirms this special chemistry. With the release of Everything Is Alive, the band will go on tour without Dave Senft for the first time. Rather than filling his position directly, the band made the wise choice to honor the quartet’s special chemistry by leaving the arrangement on the recording without being obligated to faithfully reproduce it on stage. . Dave will remain a contributing member of the band, but on tour Darlingside will play in a very different composition – sometimes with the likes of album drummer Ben Barnes and singer Molly Parden, and the group will continue to perform. skillfully repositioning itself for the start of a new and different day that will prove once again how it can be done.