by Joe Gutierrez (@phantomshred)
I first listened to Bent Ring on a bench swing on a warm Autumn day in my backyard in Western Massachusetts. I listened all the way through, focused, patient, present, crunching dead leaves into smithereens between my fingertips. Much of Bent Ring takes place in Wendy Eisenberg’s head, but sometimes we are grounded in a specific space, like “the moment on the dock” or “in the kitchen on a rainy day.” It’s evidence of the way experiences lead to memories and memories morph with and into music. This is a record of juxtaposed ideas, sometimes contrasting, how their definitions blur, how they bump up against each other and occasionally even feel like mirror images. Promise versus commitment, elation vs transcendence, exhilarate vs accelerate, can’t vs won’t, casual vs formal, resent vs refrain. These divergences provide tension throughout the record, but also, as Eisenberg croons the line on “Amends,”, “towards the peace I once adored,” there’s an immense drive for improvement and relief. We get glimpses of that resolution all through the hallways and around the corners of Bent Ring, and sometimes it most certainly seems within grasp.
The banjo is Eisenberg’s vehicle of choice for the delivery of Bent Ring’s songs, a different approach from their previous records and an instrument much more unfamiliar to them than the guitar. The compositions range from flickering fingerpicks like shuffling little jolts of twang to solemn strums that stagger steadily, dipping and diving through pitch black and bright light. Eisenberg adds a touch of bass guitar to the songs, nothing complicated or showy, just enough underlying pulse to add some heft to the banjo plucks and sung reflections hovering above. Often the few notes procure the slightest hint of doom, an ominous air later vanquished by the singer’s reflections and emboldened confidence. Michael Cormier provides flair with a toolkit of various cymbals, drums, sticks, and who knows what else. Sometimes his percussion sounds like steam escaping from busted factory pipes and valves, sometimes like the clattering of a secret hiding spot floorboard falling back into place. All is supplied tastefully, never subtracting from Eisenberg’s message, only serving in accompanying the artist in their transmission of thoughts and experiences. There are moments where a song moves along at an even current, then veers off into jumbles of weird and warmth, like a passage eloquently scrawled into a notebook until it reaches the end of the page, and pen inevitably falls upon the woodgrain of the desk, carving its words into the surface vigorously.
Bent Ring can swallow you whole. Though it’s an album packed with phenomenal lyrics and stirring melodies, perhaps what I resonate with most are the audible, recorded breaths, right before Eisenberg launches into “Abide with me” and “Abide with me verse 2.” There’s something in those quick, deep inhalations, that emanates confidence, resolution, awe, serenity. A settling, a groundedness. It sounds like somebody waking up, or coming back to life. How fitting that these breaths precede Eisenberg’s a capella takes on a classic hymn. They harmonize the hymn with themselves, constructing a luminescent cluster of layered notes, pleading for patience and grace. Eisenberg has said that “these songs are a meditation on work and love - how they intersect, how they interact with each other, how they drain, how they rehabilitate.” I hear in Bent Ring a reflection on existence, being, navigating belief in the self and potential for something bigger than the self. Instruments, voice, language, and production are all spectacular ingredients in a recipe of both cohesion and dissonance, a story of a person’s journey to know the self. Its creation and existence, its propulsion forward into the world as something that can move spirits and quell tumult, is a testament to its importance, and to its success.