Album Notes

'Quiet Desperation' might best be described as an album with indie record heart and major label ambition. It is full of hook-laden songs with smart lyrics and intricate arrangements that make it hard to believe that the band wrote and produced the record entirely themselves.

The signature of 'Quiet Desperation' is the interplay between the vocals of songwriter/guitarist Aric Jorgenson and keyboardist Leia Manuel. The evocative harmonies and counter-melodies create a moody atmosphere that gives voice to the pensive lyrical content of the record.

Jorgenson describes ‘Saint Augustine’, a standout track on the album, as a meditation on the duplicity of religion. Though the lyrics tend to deprecate the saint, who serves as a sort of symbol of organized religion, Jorgenson says he hoped to humanize rather than vilify him. “Augustine was an interesting, thoughtful, but imperfect man whose ideas had significant ramifications, both good and bad. He embodies the beauty and suffering that religion has caused”, says Jorgenson. The interplay of the aggressive, almost militant guitars with the resonating church bells perfectly captures this duplicity, and demonstrates how carefully the band works to marry music and lyrics.

Jorgenson states that his influences come as much from literature and visual art as from music. By way of example, consider ‘The Fear’, a song that’s lyrics reference T.S Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. “The evening news crawls down my spine / As I contemplate myself into a bind / This predilection will paralyze / I lie here etherized,” sings Jorgenson, amid lonely harmonica notes, eerie reverb-drenched slide guitar and a chorus of whispered voices that underpin the uncertainty of the song’s protagonist. Or thumb through the liner notes…the saturated, slightly surreal images of dilapidated toys (taken by Jorgenson himself) accentuate the thematic concern of the record, namely a sort of nostalgic lament for fading youth.

In the end 'Quiet Desperation' is more than a great indie record. It is an amalgam of literary, visual and musical influences composed by a band with a focused vision and wrought with urgent performances. It is sad, beautiful, sonically complex and almost certainly an album that represents the first offering from an important band.