091: Talons' - Milwaukee
I've taken myself away, to Italy, to a small village on the edge of Lake Como. This time, I'm not running from anything, but toward something. A new chapter, or perhaps something else suitably commemorative.
The day I arrive is grey and heavy. It's September but it doesn't feel autumnal. Summer seems to sit on the edge of things, waiting for another turn, sure of itself and what it can bring. There is fruit still on the trees, some is rotten some ripe and plump. Butterflies replace the falling leaves from back home, pirouetting through the air. Lizards find the gaps in the clouds to bask on the walls of houses. I swim in the lake and marvel at the blues. Everything seems caught in between.
I try and find the right music to fit this space but I can’t quite do it, nothing is quite mirroring the swirling mass of solitude, melancholy, grandeur, and landscape the way I need it to. I pose a question on Instagram and sift through the recommendations. Some are artists I know of, that don’t quite fit, others are wide of the mark, a nice reminder of how differently we soundtrack our own lives, how malleable a song can be when passed between different hands.
Then I press play on an album I’m unfamiliar with (recommended by Michael who runs the wonderful Dear Life Record) and find music that hits like a finger-snap, a fully-formed new world I'm thrusted into, the way we find suddenly ourselves alive in a dream.
It’s a record called After Talons’ by Talons' who, Spotify tells me, is a post-folk project from Northeast Ohio who have been releasing home recorded songs since 2003 and describes itself, succinctly and perfectly as imperfect music.
I’m swallowed by the album immediately, it’s dense, meandering waves of grey, it’s heavy voice that strains under its own weight but also shows flashes of something altogether lighter in the referential lyricism that winds through it. ‘Post-folk’ seems like an apt descriptor, for all these things might mean, the songs drifting between folk-like sentiments and then expanding into something akin to post-rock without ever reaching the explosion.
I can’t tell you much more about it or them, because I haven’t made my way there yet. I’ve wandered and listened, and listened again, not yet drawn to the context or finer details. I can tell you that the record came out in 2017, and Talons' currently have 932 monthly listeners on Spotify. And so it feels like some kind of secret because it is.
And so, from one kindly and perfect recommendation, I pass it on to a few hundred more people, who might be far from water, who might not need these sad and serpentine songs, but might find a way to mould them, to shift their form into their own landscapes and find the same sense of mysterious magic as I did, looking out upon this lake where the clouds sit on mountains, where the boats keep running through the night, distinguished only by the spotlight at their bow, illuminating a small pocket of water in front of them so they seem like their own kind of shooting star, cumbersome and weighty against the thick black lake, and somehow silent in spite of it all.
~
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