by Conor Lochrie (@conornoconnor)
Poise is the band of Lucie Murphy and her debut solo album, Vestiges, sounds very much like a New York indie rock record. Born in Manhattan to a Bowery punk father and now based in Brooklyn, Murphy was originally inspired by Frankie Cosmos although much of Vestiges sounds closer to the grit of Sharon Van Etten.
Everyone has to escape the Brooklyn bubble sometimes though. Contending with the unexpected death of her beloved father and seeing her first tour cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Murphy removed herself to an isolated cabin in Vermont. It’s why these songs contain searingly honest and incisive songwriting that perhaps could only have been intimated through this self-reckoning isolation.
It’s also why Vestiges is an album of perseverance and resilience born out of tragedy. Essentially a collection concerned with the many facets of grief, Murphy believed in what she was doing so much that she self-released the record. “I’m gonna show you... All that I can do,” she bellows in the opening track “Walked Through Fire,” setting her defiance all out early. In the short scuzzy punk piece “Nothing You Can Say” she’s similarly obstinate, crying “I didn’t need you then / And I don’t need you now.”
She’s careful throughout to capture the difficulties in maintaining one’s relationships after experiencing a grief so huge as the loss of a parent. On the closing acoustic track “I’m Not,” she contends with the mistrust that she feels about who she is and who she wants to be for another person; Murphy is simply not the same person that she was before grief crossed her door. Sweet harmonies fill “Vessel” as she achingly notes her changed future: “No longer is my body / A vessel for just one / Cause coursing through me always / Is your blood.”
Sometimes conflicting emotion even arrives within the space of one song. “Don’t want to grow older / If you won’t see me change / Already have too much to tell you,” she sighs in the title track, before ending it resiliently: “And I will live the biggest life for you / So no one can ever forget you.” Murphy and her band - Sam Skinner on guitar, Theo Munger on drums, and Joshua Marre on guitar - have also collated a strong mixture of lighter and darker rhythms. The airy “Don’t Worry” (the clearest indicator of Frankie Cosmos’ influence) follows into “Show Me Your Love” with its tremulous rock guitar line which then becomes the soft and considered “Vestiges”.
This wouldn’t have been an easy album to write; in its vulnerable reckoning with grief, it recalls the work of Mount Eerie in the heartbreaking A Crow Looked at Me. It’s beautiful to listen to Murphy, you hope, emerge from it all stronger, her confidence intact. As debut albums go, not many can be as insightful as Vestiges is into the mind of the artist.