Crooked words #22: Ruby Gill, Claire Cronin, Biita Houdei
Ruby Gill - Carol / Not Carol
Everything in a constant swill between balance and imbalance. A leaf holds on to its branch, and then it's drifting to the dirt; our eyes tell us one thing and suddenly another; no sooner are we here before we're gone.
Little ripples of this ever-present, ever-precarious equilibrium run right through the veins of 'Carol / Not Carol', the first single from Ruby Gill's newly announced third album, Fishing is not about fishing, released October 16th. And it makes for something beautifully compelling, a meandering journey-song that was written in the immediate aftermath of Ruby and her wife being the first people to arrive to the aftermath of a "gnarly car crash".
Instrumentally subtle but always colourful, the song comes alive through its words, Gill's almost monotone voice a vessel for a whole world to quietly unravel from. "You never know quite when your time’s up," she sings, a hushed sense of poignancy wavering up from somewhere deep in the chest, "I always thought it’d be that storm that ripped the salt bush from the red dirt and pulled the hinges from the doors."
It's the song's little inflections that linger longest, a catalogue of small moments that shift in the light as repeated listens gently fold them into changing shapes. "All this open road’s not worth it, if we don’t get to make it home."
A tender and engrossing four-minutes or so of melodrama, the song is still rolling around my head as I write this, even though the physical form of it has faded into the quiet of the day. That's how we really know.
Claire Cronin - Black Water
I have a couple of Claire Cronin LPs; she's one of those artists that I almost always listen to in physical form rather than digitally. It's got something to do with her strange, meandering, dark-of-the-night folk songs being far more fitting for a world that carries dust on the surface, that's always open to imperfection, the static in a room.
Announced this week, The Bruise is Cronin's fourth LP, and her third for Orindal Records. It's also her first in five years, following-up 2021's Bloodless, and is said to be "crafted in the same spirit" as Cronin's book of non-fiction, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God which she released in 2020.
New song 'Black Water' is suitably titled and suitably murky, and while it's mostly just centred around voice and guitar, it exudes a heaviness that never shifts – the overall, and at times overwhelming, mood one of weighty shadows, of things hidden in the dark corners. Cronin's voice remains one of great depth, forming its words with secretive sense of intrigue, however, its most captivating nuance is, perhaps, the fact that it feels like it could all crumble to dust at any given moment.
Rolling on for more than six-minutes it makes for a spellbinding return, full of all the oddities and idiosyncrasies that have quietly lit up all her work to-date; a solitary candle to the depths of night.
Pre-order the new album now, via Bandcamp
Biita Houdei - Night Fright
I've written about Biita Houdei's forthcoming debut album here and elsewhere already, and it takes another colourful leap towards its release this week. The first album to feature the wonderful songwriter Haley Heynderickx in lead-producer role, This Bed Was Made For Me was a communal, deliberately laborious project that radiates that heart and soul at every twist and turn.
Following the album's announcement, alongside the beautiful Buck Meek featuring 'The Ground Here', Biita has this week shared 'Night Fright' – one of the record's most singular moments. Showcasing the more playful side of Biita's work, the song folds itself into all manner of beguiling shapes while always maintaining something both evocative and completely mesmerising.
The little production oddities that flicker throughout, the strange delivery of some its lines and lyrics, drift to the foreground, conjuring a whole world that quietly wraps itself around you; the song revealing more and new shades of light the more times you return to it.
"Many of my favourite albums didn’t reveal themselves instantly to me,” Biita says of the album. “Some did, of course, but I had to work to understand the full scope of the piece as a whole. I encourage people to dive deeper into everything that they choose to consume. It is not my intention to sound pretentious, but instead, I am trying harder to explain the gratitude I have for being able to craft every part of this album— using my hands, my brain, my voice, my visions. To me, it is an all encompassing work of art. I am thankful for the time it took.”
The song is accompanied by a truly brilliant video, which you can view in all its strange and striking glory below right now. The album is released Sept 18th.
