Crooked Words #25: Fog Lake, Danielle Fricke

Fog Lake – styrofoam / gamut

Aaron Powell has been releasing music under his Fog Lake guise for well over a decade now. It's 13 years since I first wrote about his work here on GFP, the holy cross EP introducing me to his strained but subtle bedroom-recorded indie rock, that has never strayed far from its roots, but has pulled countless moments of magic from the underlying melancholy.

We last heard from Powell on 2023's midnight society, a 10-song LP released in the early summer of 2023, and Fog Lake returns with another full-length album in just a couple of weeks, for another collection silvery, wintery lofi pop.

Titled hollowbody, the new album was preceded by the somewhat breezy 'bogus' last month, and Powell has shared another two cuts from it now in the form of 'styrofoam' and 'gamut'. The first of those is gently buoyant, little flickers of Elliott Smith in his more spirited moments bristle at the song's heart, the waltzing percussion driving Powell's voice forward in a dance of its own making.

Different in tone, but no less affecting, 'gamut' is slightly more claustrophobic, the instrumentation all close and stuffy and unrelenting, Powell's voice this time pulling through the fogginess to appear like something of human heart in the middle of a slightly off-kilter and spiralling dreamworld.

As affecting and effective as we've come to expect over the years, all three songs feel shaped by what's come before but never reliant on it, shifting things once more as Powell continues to hollow out a body of work entirely of his own creation. Beautiful and always a little bruised at the edges.

hollowbody LP is released November 20th

Danielle Fricke – Yarrow

Another artist that features deep in the GFP archive is Danielle Fricke, whose previous project, Snow Mantled Love, was also featured heavily on the old GFP blog, a little further back even than Fog Lake, in the heady days of 2012.

Snow Mantled Love released a beautiful record in 2013 but then ceased to be. Danielle has sparingly released gorgeous solo work in the time since, however though less so in recent years: a collection of instrumental lullabies in 2020, followed by a standalone song, 'Happy', released in 2023.

A lovely and unexpected treat, then, that today Danielle has released Yarrow, a textural, poignant, captivating new eight-song collection that drifts toward her more fragile and folky sound – save for the occasional leap into choppier waters. Yarrow's biggest leap, in fact, comes early on, it's opening 90-second instrumental giving way to the richly absorbing 'Friend', a song that winds and grows over the course of six-minutes before bursting into life with heavy drums; dark storm clouds billowing above and below.

That crashing release is dense and hypnotic and somewhat unexpected, but it's also something of an outlier, the rest of the album folding back into itself to present something of a slow-crawl through fractured melodies and gentle – if not always soothing – soundscapes.

'Hiatus' is a Grouper-esque meander through compelling and weighty fogginess, held in the grip of an electronic hue that's replicated in the album's striking closing track 'Core'. Here though, it drifts directly into 'Steady', another six-minute track, but an entirely different shaped one to the preceding and aforementioned 'Friend'. Spooky piano and creeping strings swirl and gather and grow, spreading out like a gossamer web around Fricke's tender voice, a held warmth that keeps its glow in spite of the surrounding darkness.

In fact it's that dichotomy that makes the whole thing such a rewarding and spellbinding listen. You never quite know where you stand or perhaps, you're never quite sure whether the place you stand is going to provide stability or collapse beneath you. In its quiet and tender moments, Yarrow is exquisite and captivating, but it never holds itself there for long. The edges crumble, the wind swirls. Night creeps in; eerie and magnetic and wholly beautiful.

Yarrow is out now, available via Bandcamp

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