Catherine Elicson
River of Fat
SELF-RELEASED
It’s been long enough since the latest Empath album that a quick Google search will direct you instead to new records by a Danish heavy psych outfit and a Finnish ambient artist, both releasing music under the same name. Though you could catch the Philly “freak pop” band—which has certainly harnessed psych and ambient elements throughout their own discography—on tour earlier this year, there’s been a shortage of new material since 2022’s Visitor. So when bandleader Catherine Elicson sings “Never faded / But never found out myself, ’cause I’ve been waiting on you” to open her debut solo album, it’s tempting to take the lines out of context as some kind of meta commentary.
To do so, of course, would be disingenuous; rather than compensating any sense of absence, Elicson’s songs flourish in it. Quietly defiant and beautifully insular, River of Fat is a capsule of self-discovery and experimentation outside the confines of a band, yes, but also any kind of relationship structure. Lyrically, some tracks seem to emerge from a pattern of perpetual (and mutual) avoidance—“Forever disappearing from you” is what she calls it on “My War”—but their bedroom intimacy makes the act of disappearance sound like a treasure trove of vulnerability. Elicson is at her most starkly expressive on “Figure,” which comprises just her voice and guitar; it’s magical in a way she herself articulates over the lo-fi folk of “Safe”: “I didn’t think I’d ever feel / Things outside of me were real / Until you whispered in my ear.” It feels as if Elicson is whispering in your ear, magnifying reality, even when her voice bends, soars, and crumbles under the weight of effects.
Most of River of Fat, in fact, foregoes that simple voice-and-guitar presentation. Aided by longtime collaborator and engineer Shaun Sutkus, Elicson tracked the album using nothing more than a TASCAM 4-track tape machine, a KORG, a Roland SP-404, and a vintage Stratocaster. More than just raw, the songs are gauzy and mutable. In a fried-up parallel universe, opener “I’m on Fire” could pass for a Bruce Springsteen cover; “A Warm Day in the Park” is captured instrumentally with the saturation turned all the way up, until Elicson makes a little space for a field recording. A swirling sense of propulsion nearly swallows her voice on the title track, yet it also has her running amok on the vibrant “Flowers Smile.”
In its heavy, pulpous smallness, River of Fat seems to wrestle with a big question: How do we tend to “endless fields of time,” as Elicson puts it on the title track? Do we shrivel out of view and succumb to our insignificance, or keep pummeling to the beat of our hearts? I hear the latter in “All Sound,” which finds her soloing and cooing on pure instinct, but there’s also something freeingly anonymous about it. At the end, though, Elicson delivers a song so personal and widescreen in its breathless romanticism it springs right to the foreground; if there are more songs like “CTW” on the horizon, her next record should be a knockout. The scene may be flooding with Empaths, but there’s only one Catherine Elicson, who lets go with a thrilling suggestion of where River of Fat might lead.
