Artist: Sky Furrows
Album: Self-titled
Year: 2020
Label: Tape Drift Records / Skell Records / Philthy Rex Records
Sky Furrows are cool and weird in all the ways I love, delivering compulsive, idiosyncratic no-psych grooves with spoken-ish word poetics. I could--and have--zoned out to this self-titled album on repeat. I lost a lot of time at my dayjob when I should have been doing actual work, but I just wanted to hear this over and over again.
What I find so compelling is the sense of balance the band achieves. The guitar/bass/percussion build off the repetition of selective, discrete grooves, perfectly suited to lull you into a trance while Karen Schoemer's labyrinthine words burrow into your ears. Though the vocals are talky, they effuse subtle melodies and rhythms that give the words urgency. Her lyrics are more sprawling than the focused sets of notes that comprise the music, and yet in either element there is neither too few notes or too many words. It takes multiple listens to pull all the elements together, but I like that this isn't the sort of album to show everything all at once.
The first track, "Alyousha," reminds a little bit of Slint in the verse but without the heavy breakdowns. Lyrically, big ideas alternate with personal puncta. "Between what we say and what we mean, civilizations come and go," Schoemer sings, "like the time I told my father he was a bully and we didn't speak for years." This line is suggestive of how her lyrics often fuse the personal and political, the macro and micro, and the surreal and depressingly-hyper-real.
Track two, "Ensenada" begins with one of those great brooding basslines, just a few bars that repeat unchanging, but with each repetition it somehow gets heavier and heavier, setting the perfect foundating for the 15 min track. The guitar is at its most atmospheric on this song, and I liked all the creepy and discordant ambience it added.
My favorite song is the last, "Foreign Cities," a post-punk philippic against the modern world, sort of like if Yo La Tengo wrote "Institutionalized": "I don't belong in retail, I have so much more to offer!" The lyrics build a story full of relatable outrage. "Perhaps I was doing well to be working here after all, I had taken a pay cut, but maybe that was ok, I still had a bunch of bitterness in my throat after my last job, the owner and I didn't get along, clearly she had underestimated me, petty disagreements had accumulated until it was intolerable, couldn't stand another day there, I was not fired, I quit, I'm starting to feel at home in this new job, maybe this time I can last a year or two, settle in, have some stability in my life." Maybe it's not the best song to listen to at work? Then again, it gave me a glimmer of hope on an otherwise bleak day. So, for that, I thank you, Sky Furrows. Now if I can just track down a copy of this LP, which appears to be out of print.
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