Saintseneca
Highwallow & Supermoon Songs
LAME-O
Ohio’s Saintseneca open the 21-song, 80-minute Highwalllow & Supermoon Songs with a field recording featuring the sounds of wind passing through a singing harp. This is the kind of band Saintseneca is and always has been. There’s simply no avoiding the fact that their ambitions—lofty and concerned with no less than “creating a world of song”—can be about as cringe as they come. I hate to use that word, but these are simply the facts. Songwriter Zac Little remains drawn like a moth to the flame to the most easily mocked aspects of the late-’00s indie-folk scene he came up in: curly mustaches, suspenders, weaving harmonies. This album alone features such instruments as dulcimer, banjo, Omnichord, mandolin, bouzouki, flute, flugelhorn, and at least two separate people playing a tree branch. I admit that this all may sound non-negotiable, but if you can see beyond the crunchy outer layer, Highwalllow & Supermoon Songs proves that Saintseneca are a band who very much earn their suspenders.
For proof, look at their single “Infinity Leaf Cover.” There was a recent online hubbub made about their former freak-folking peers Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros for having produced the supposed worst song of all time. There are many reasons to find that band tiresome, but I’d argue that it wasn’t really “Home” that did the genre in, but the countless of copycats that followed. You can pretend it doesn’t all you want, but “Home” stills hits—absurd hippie costuming aside. My point is that the songs actually matter, and for whatever eye-rolling you might send Saintseneca’s direction, a song like “Infinity Leaf Cover”—a seven-minute epic in three parts with layers of intricate phrasing, skittering percussion, and a furious outro—is evidence that they very much have the juice. Even when they lean into more pure folk, as on the relatively bare “Hot Water Song,” they know how to build a certain tension that exists even in the quietest moments. “There’s a hole way down, where people like me have fallen / All in time we will climb back to the light,” sings Little as the song bursts into its finale.
That’s another difference between Saintseneca and the glut of folk-rock acts that have come and gone over the years: their indifference to the foibles of love or the aching sincerity of heartache as they instead attempt to capture the enormity of existence. Their view is almost always cosmic in nature, something that Little seems to identify and almost mourn early on the record. “I could sing sweet nothing, forever and a day / I could sing sweet nothing, if only I had nothing to say.” Oh how simple it would be to sit down and write an innocuous little song, sung and strummed without a care in the world. When he does get into specifics, any sadness is existential as much as it is personal. Often this is funneled through “I” statements, but on “Escape Artist,” a tale of a figure who “left her body” when “the plumbing in her head just quit,” Little seems to view death primarily through the prism of hope, energy, and time all running out at once.
Like any heady, psychedelic-leaning folk act, there are times when their instinct for the opaque leads them ever so slightly into self-parody (“Call of all your oracles, your patron saint of broken phones / Alter all your altars, ’til your holy drones are dial tones” sure sounds cool, if nothing else). But really, isn’t that sort of what you pay for here? In for a penny, in for a pound, no? “I was only asking for it all / Waves of revelation and my own personal young god,” sings Little on “Infinity Lead Cover,” a testament to both his lofty ambitions and how close he gets to reaching them.
