#sky furrows

Here, her lyrics have a rough cut conversational quality, the words themselves well-worn with use (no thesaurus required) but arranged in startling, vivid images. The opening track “Shopping Bags” considers happiness from all angles. It opens with a couple posing for wedding pictures, not on the day they’re married but earlier, commemorating a happy event that hasn’t happened yet. The narrator passes by accidentally, detouring to avoid the photo bomb, sardonic and removed. She herself has just had the consumer’s pleasure of finding decent stuff in the free box, classic paperbacks, a bike helmet, teacups.

“I was excited to have all this stuff until a minute ago. Until a minute ago, I felt like I’d really scored,” she observes, casually nailing the transience of shopper’s high. Other images flash by, moms smoking pot on a stroller outing, women in hijabs conversing, the ordinary stuff of human connection. The narrator gauges her difficult relationship with these scenes in a verse that goes “Happy people are intrusive, parents, families, any person who has another/I hate them all, yet I feel dependent on them as if any chance I have for happiness rides upon their backs.” It moves quick, this verse. It takes on no unnecessary weight or sentiment. And yet it gets at something deep and resonant about modern disconnection.

The words take up the foreground, but they wouldn’t stick as well without the music, which is spare and mobile and full of sharp edges. The band shares members with psychedelic Burnt Hills—Eric Hardiman, Mike Griffin and Phil Donnelly—but their work here is tight and rhythmically disciplined. It twitches and shudders under the verses, shadowy and ominous. The sound of it reminds me most of the no wave sounds: Thalia Zedek’s band E, The Contortions, Lydia Lunch and Retrovirus. 

It comes together best in the blistering “Koba Grozny,” with its lurching guitar riff, its punched out, periodically explosive drumming, its torrid blare of feedback. The music is always on the verge of busting out—you can feel the threat and release of it building—but it remains in check. The lyrics are similarly violent, recounting waves and waves of purges following the battle of Grozny, with the refrain “Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.” It’s a bracing piece of work, dry eyed and realistic, but also psychedelically vivid, and it hits hard right now with war dragging on in Ukraine and flaring hot in Gaza and threatening to break out in all manner of places.

Reflect and Oppose isn’t an easy album, but you won’t forget it soon.