Freak Scene #47: The Folk Implosion and Sailor Down
Catching up on a couple of releases from 2024 as the new year gets under way.
A Guide to Music in Western Mass. (and sometimes Connecticut)
This week in Freak Scene, we catch up on some music from 2024 before this year’s new releases start to flow. First, I somehow completely missed that the Folk Implosion released a new album last year — their first LP since 1999 to feature both co-founders — while Northampton’s Sailor Down were busy, too.
Sometimes musical reunions come together as if no time has passed: Dinosaur Jr. reassembling the original lineup in 2004, for example. For the Folk Implosion, it’s more like time has caught up to them on Walk Thru Me, the first full-length album Lou Barlow and John Davis have made together in 25 years.
Barlow started the Folk Implosion with Davis in 1993 as a pen-pal side project after Barlow’s previous side project, Sebadoh, became his main band when Dinosaur Jr. booted him out in 1989 (thus setting the stage for that 2004 reunion). Got all that? Doesn’t matter. Point is, Barlow and Davis began grafting electronic elements and trip-hop beats onto alt-rock guitar arrangements in a way that sounded fresh — listen back to 1995’s “Natural One,” from the Kids soundtrack, which was the Folk Implosion’s biggest hit — but also a little self-conscious. Davis left the group after One Part Lullaby in 1999, leaving Barlow to release one additional LP with different collaborators in 2003. He and Davis came back together to record the 2022 EP It Just Goes With, and now they’ve returned with Walk Thru Me.
Genre lines have blurred considerably since the band’s ’90s incarnation, and the group’s blend of electronica and indie-rock feels more natural and cohesive on Walk Thru Me. The 10 songs here are confident, even assertive, with robust rhythm sections (recorded in Barlow’s attic in Greenfield; Davis lives in North Carolina) augmented by guitars, keyboards and synths. On this album, Davis also brought along various Middle Eastern stringed instruments, including the oud, saz and setar, at least one of which pops up on “Water Torture.” Barlow and Davis take turns on vocals. Barlow sings in rich, low tones on opener “Crepuscular” over the loud snap of a tight snare drum and circles of guitar. Davis has a more reedy, nasal voice on “The Day You Died,” a polyrhythmic number with a punchy bassline and bright keyboards.
The songs on Walk Thru Me are tightly structured and assured, but there’s still an experimental vibe on “The Fable and the Fact,” which layers squalling guitars over a shifting rhythm, or “O.K. to Disconnect,” where fuzzed-over guitars hurry to keep pace with the swiftly flowing beat and blatty bass. The album overall is a welcome return from a pair of musicians whose creative relationship feels as strong now as it ever was, if not stronger.
Sailor Down
Over the past few years, Northampton’s Sailor Down have expanded from the mostly solo bedroom-pop project of Chloe Deeley on the 2021 EP Skip the Line into a foursome on last year’s six-song collection Maybe We Should Call It a Night. Along the way, Deeley has held tight to a handmade aesthetic on songs stocked with plaintive melodies and prismatic vocal harmonies.
Though the songs have a loose-limbed, lo-fi feel, they are deceptively sophisticated little pop gems. Tight harmony carries the melody all the way through “I Can’t Make You,” and Deeley’s lyrics on “Vacation (Forgive Me, Evan)” capture the sense of a status quo teetering on the edge of irrevocable change as she sings over a blend of jangling guitars and murky organ. Elsewhere, knots of guitar at the start of “Locals Night” smooth into a chugging riff as Deeley sings a refrain through a curtain of backing vocals from bassist Kevin McGrath and guitarist Ben Husk (drummer Nat Peirce rounds out the quartet).
Sailor Down are often pegged as a latter-day emo band, and the group would have fit alongside Azure Ray or Bright Eyes on the Saddle Creek Records roster in the late ’90s. Yet the “emo” description seems reductive here, like a too limiting shorthand for a band that is something more, or different, than what was on offer back then. Deeley’s lyrics often have a confessional tone, and there is angst on these songs, but Maybe We Should Call it a Night is the work of an artist who is finding her own way, one project at a time.
That’s it for this week. Happy New Year!
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