131: Adelaide - Clip-Ons
I was only recently lamenting the days of yore when we were a fully functioning (kinda), all guns blazing (kinda), music platform, when I would spend a few hours each week digging through Bandcamp's digital crates to try and unearth diamonds. We always tried to work that way first, peeling away the layers of the mainstream, and the sub-mainstream, to find songs and albums either submitted to us directly by the artist, all just sitting there in ether, waiting to be found.
For a number of reasons, I have so much less time to do that these days, but I carved out a couple of hours last night to do so - and would you look at that, subsequently stumbled upon this absolute gem of an album from Chicago songwriter Adelaide.
Released at the end of September 2024, Mulberry Tree is hushed and wonderful, a little bruised maybe, but glowed by sunlight. "Mulberry Tree is June and early July, it is dusty corners collecting in childhood homes," so the written intro to the album goes, "it is patience, it is falling in love, it is falling asleep with a tooth under your pillow, it is sitting in the branches of a tree, it is writing letters to send far away, it is grass-stained knees and juice-stained fingers."
Pitched as a compilation, with songs written between the summer of 2022 and 2023, Mulberry Tree nevertheless hangs together beautifully, the songs tied together by some invisible static, a gentle tender breeze running from room to room. The songs are mostly spare and acoustic, the tender compositions built with just enough weight to carry the sentimentality that ripples right through the heart of these songs.
Adelaide's voice is plain and understated and, as such, carries a gorgeous human warmth in its bones, reminiscent perhaps of solo Florist, or early Tomberlin. Each of its songs - eleven of them, wrapped up in a little over 25 minutes - carry something special but it was 'Clip-Ons' that immediately leapt out to me, with its surprising, sudden rising of temperature, a kick of the drums, all woozy and spiralling.
The album is only available digitally, for a mere five bucks, so I highly recommend grabbing the whole thing, diamond upon diamond, so patiently waiting.
Buy Mulberry Tree on Bandcamp here
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