Darlingside - Fish Pond Fish (Album Review)
Darlingside are back with more bucolic future-folk on their new album Fish Pond Fish. The Massachusetts quartet have not lain idle since their last full-length LP, 2018’s Extralife, having released the Look Up & Fly Away EP in 2019 and a 20-track collection of instrumentals earlier this year. Where Extralife imagined a post-apocalyptic future, Fish Pond Fish is essentially a love letter to the natural world, rooted in the here and now. Work that began in late 2019 - with the band living together in the studio with producer Peter Katis - had to be halted and the record was subsequently completed with each member working remotely from home. For a band whose character is reliant on - and embodied by - a finely balanced synergy (live, they perform around just one central mic) this sudden change must have thrown up significant challenges. Ultimately, though, these have worked in Darlingside’s favour, the resultant album having more in the way of space and intimacy than those that came before.
The dreamlike, ethereal harmonies of ‘Woolgathering’ prelude the synchronous violin-and-guitar chug of ‘Crystal Caving’, a trademark of the band’s sound. Staunchly acoustic but never fearful of being progressive, they are often described as a modern hybrid of CSN&Y and Simon & Garfunkel, but Darlingside are smarter and odder than both and surely no longer deserve to be labelled by the comparisons. When you marry an impenetrably tight four-part vocal with eccentric, existential lyrics and a nerdish, experimental musical approach, what you get can only be described as, well, Darlingsidian.
One noticeable difference this time around is that Darlingside have embraced the heretofore eschewed drum kit: the relentless beats and handclapping of ‘Ocean Bed’ lending frenetic darkness to the track’s lighter plink and plunk. All this chatter makes the hushed, madrigal-like ‘Keep Coming Home’ all the more powerful in its wake, as vocals tiptoe in one, two, three and four parts against an eddying drone of strings and electronic atmospherics; everything building and reducing and building again.
The thicker texture of recent single ‘Green + Evergreen’ rolls in majestically, its snare chuffing like a train. The lyrics plant us amid a thick forest, reminding us to persevere in hope: “the path is closed but a way remains” and encouraging us to find freedom in the constant cycle of death and rebirth. This leads logically into ‘Time Will Be’ where the band explore their recurrent obsession with the perpetual ticking of the clock: “Time will be the life of me and time will be the death, the death of me”. The spare, raggedy banjo and guitar gently underscore the plaintive vocal here, in one of the album’s most beautiful and perfect moments.
‘February/Stars’ follows and is, as its title suggests, a track of two halves. The glittering, easy-going strum of the first three minutes sharply segues into a positively baroque second section, its exposed vocal, riddled with celestial imagery, set starkly against solemn piano chords. This initially unsettling pairing neatly mirrors the way in which the album was made and could also serve as a wider metaphor for how the pandemic struck us; all that possibility and freedom abruptly being swept aside.
The intimate sadness of ‘Denver’ descends into a minute-long anti-jam, with distant vocals and gull-like strings circling the bones of its frail acoustic guitar part. This makes the brightness in ‘Mountain + Sea’ feel like a resurrection, and one brimming with that Darlingsidian sweetness: the aforementioned chug of strings, the delicate cascade of mandolin and guitar and a comfort-blanket chorus sung in perpetual canon.
The less tangible ‘See You Change’ is the only song in the set I would consider remotely expendable, though it does provide a lull before the emotionally-charged hope of ‘Light On In The Dark’ gifts us an uplifting finale. It taps into the lonely torpor of being trapped in one’s own brain “Are you spinning in and out of true?/Pink Moon playing in the dead of noon” while inspiring the listener to seize the day “fly to the sun in your suburban shoes” and to “come into bloom” . It reminds us of our place in the living world and that each of us can be beacons in the bleakness. For that reason, more than anything I’ve heard in the past seven months, this feels like a song everybody needs to hear.
The songs on Fish Pond Fish may not be quite as immediate as those on Darlingside’s previous releases but they are every bit as charming, intriguing and magical. They tackle the biggest themes in the simplest ways and the constant references to nature force us to consider our time on this precarious planet. Never has such navel gazing felt so outward-looking and never has the insignificance of human existence felt so significant as in Darlingside’s hands. As the record’s artwork suggests, these are four individuals working as one - regardless of whether or not they are in the same place - and Fish Pond Fish is simply a wonderful, wonderful thing. The word genius doesn’t really begin to come close. All you need is Darlingside.
Review by Rich Barnard
Fish Pond Fish is released October 9th, 2020 on Thirty Tigers.
Darlingside @RGM
Darlingside are back with more bucolic future-folk on their new album Fish Pond Fish. The Massachusetts quartet have not lain idle since their last full-length LP, 2018’s Extralife, having released the Look Up & Fly Away EP in 2019 and a 20-track collection of instrumentals earlier this year. Where Extralife imagined a post-apocalyptic future, Fish Pond Fish is essentially a love letter to the natural world, rooted in the here and now. Work that began in late 2019 - with the band living together in the studio with producer Peter Katis - had to be halted and the record was subsequently completed with each member working remotely from home. For a band whose character is reliant on - and embodied by - a finely balanced synergy (live, they perform around just one central mic) this sudden change must have thrown up significant challenges. Ultimately, though, these have worked in Darlingside’s favour, the resultant album having more in the way of space and intimacy than those that came before.