173: Little Mazarn - Crystal Cave
The space found within Little Mazarn's new LP feels illuminating and remarkable. Within its ten songs there gaps remain, gentle places of rest that seem to hold just as much quiet power as the words and sounds that are conjured around them. The band's third album, Mustang Island sees songwriter Lindsey Verrill work small wonders alongside bandmates Jeff Johnston and Carolina Chauffe, the trio crafting a fascinating document, a world unto itself.
In places, the songs here just float as standard folk songs tend to do, but they're never afraid to twist the fabric a little, to smudge the scenery. Little flashes of experimentation creep in unexpectedly, elsewhere, as above, everything drifts away to leave just a ripple of their presence, an indentation of what was.
'The Cloud and The Snail' is focussed and compelling, ripples of percussion and soft skewed sounds sitting as the songs colourful backdrop, while 'Murmuration' is a near five-minute instrumental track that feels so tenderly constructed you almost find yourself tip-toeing through it all.
However you treat them, the songs on Mustang Island makes for a wonderful journey. Verrill's voice is something both charming and playful and always full of weight. It sings of grief, of chapters unexpectedly ending to form new ones, and you can sense that upheaval even in its quietest, faintest moments.
It's certainly best consumed as one whole piece, a landscape to step inside of and commit to, and so we'll share the beautiful opening track here, cherry-picked only in the hope that it'll convince you to keep listening until the last note of 'The Golden Hour' sinks below the horizon.
“Grief, and the avoidance of grief, is a big part of being human,” says Lindsey. “You make a choice, and then you grieve for the other choice. Or you finish a meal and literally grieve that it was so good. If you really befriend grief, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s here, in this pancake, which I loved so much that I ate the whole thing, and now it’s gone.’”
Buy it on Bandcamp here, via Dear Life Records
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