Crooked Words #14: Wendy Eisenberg, John Andrews, CAMILLE CAMILLE

Hello, hello.

Two new albums, released today, one new single that lingered. Three new pieces from me to you, shared with the hope they find you well, shared with the hope that something here resonates.

Happy listening...

Wendy Eisenberg - Wendy Eisenberg

When Wendy Eisenberg moved from Western Massachusetts to Brooklyn in 2020, they began wandering into folk music as a way of finding space and light and soft colours in their new and often colourless concrete surroundings. That journeying – which took Eisenberg through the work of Gillian Welch and John Prine, Judee Sill and Joanna Newsom – would lead, eventually, to this gorgeous new collection songs, released today.

For those reasons, and more, the self-titled aspect of the album makes sense. Weisenberg has apparently never felt more 'certain' about their work as they do here, these often hushed, occasionally skewed and playful songs, following a decade or so of far more freewheeling and avant-garde recordings and performances.

“The songs are genuinely folk songs,” Eisenberg says in the album's foreword. “The production is less about seeing what the guitar might be capable of and more accepting the inherent strangeness of the languages it has spoken for the last century and a half.”

And there is a strangeness here, but it's never a harsh one. It's magical and meaningful, very often beautiful. It's hazy light shifting the temperature of the world around you into something surprising and unexpected; it's the quiet absurdity of time passing, regardless of what we're trying to hold on to, let go of.

Wendy Eisenberg LP is out now, via Joyful Noise, and available on Bandcamp

John Andrews & The Yawns - STREETSWEEPER

I can't quite tell if there's a sense of detachment running through STREETSWEEPER or if it's just the unhurried nature of it all that lends these songs a subtle dreamlike quality. It's perhaps both, and it's perhaps the chief reason that tt feels like its constantly nudging you to listen more curiously, pay closer attention.

Andrews' fifth album alongside The Yawns (Noah Bond and Keven Louis Lareau, both of whom feature alongside Andrews in Cut Worms), the songs here follow his storied gaze, gentle snapshots of his world brought to life by an extended backing collective that features Luke Temple (Here We Go Magic), Will Henriksen (Florry), and Emily Moales (Star Moles).

Taken un-curiously, these songs could wash over you. A warm and jangly collection of folk-leaning pop, the work is patient and unhurried, held in a warm glow, but there's a sincerity in the heart of the writing that keeps tugging at your sleeve, revealing a little more about the characters the deeper you dig into the soil of it all.

Andrews began and finished the album at his home in New York's Red Hook, an off-shoot of the sprawling city that has been left a little unconnected; "a neighborhood that sits just beyond the natural drift of the city," as the album's bio states.

It's a fact that makes sense the more the album lingers. These songs hold the gaze of an outsider, a curious mind that watches on as faces and places weave in and out of focus, that finds some kind of magic in what others might well perceive as the mundane: flea markets and sports fields, the warehouses that once sustained a city left abandoned to rot at the river's edge.

However you take it, however they find you, there's both wonderment and melancholy to these songs and they play off each other until finding an enchantment that hovers and holds; the good old mystery of life and song.

CAMILLE CAMILLE - J'ai rêvé

Announcing her new album 'Enchanted Sea', out May 29th via Labelman, Belgian songwriter Camille Willemart has released a brand new song from her burgeoning and expressive all-caps project CAMILLE CAMILLE.

The delivery of that name might suggest something wholly emphatic, but Camille's work lingers at the opposite end of the spectrum, gifting something quiet, aching and tender. Singing in her own language instantly lends the song a sense of mysticism, but regardless, J'ai rêvé's ingredients – Camille's own striking voice, the haunting swirl of voices that join her, the textured, luminous playing – add up to something completely spellbinding.

Just bewitching enough to draw you in close, just understated enough to hold you there, it's a beautiful song, reminiscent of Josephine Foster's otherworldly folk music, and a captivating opener to an intriguing new chapter.