by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
The past seven years have been good for Boston’s Squitch. The band have released four full length albums in addition to a handful of singles, splits, and collaborative recordings. Growing ever more confident with each successive release, Squitch have continuously raised the bar, a great band getting ever better. Without giving consideration to the future or lack-there-of, it’s safe to say that Squitch have made their best record to date with Tumbledown Mountain, a collection of songs both personal and inherently complex. It’s an album that deals with the finality of things but as the band know, “it’s not the end.” Things change. Life changes. Being in a band in your twenties isn’t always built to last. People relocate, priorities shift, but recorded music is forever, capturing a place and time, despite whatever comes next. Tumbledown Mountain wasn’t conceived in one last blaze of glory, the band’s fourth album was nurtured over time, the songs carefully considered, many taking shape in various forms (see: night moth) prior to becoming full-on Squitch tunes.
Sometime shortly after the release of Learn To Be Alone, Squitch found their long-term trio line-up paired down to the duo of Emery Spooner (guitar, vocals) and Denzil Leach (drums), but before long the band had expanded their ranks to include both Grace Ward (guitar) and Kit Malmberg (bass). From what once posed as a sizeable loss to the project became a deeply fleshed out sound, their textures given a new sense of nuance and structural heft. Everything on Tumbledown Mountain (released via Disposable America) feels perfectly in its place, sentiment matched with both tangled fuzz, gorgeous harmonies, and sincere twang. Recorded together with Bradford Krieger at Big Nice, it’s an album that feels both sprightly in spirit but dense in construction. Krieger captured the band with a sense of perfection, mixed and mastered with a stunning clarity. Squitch’s new two guitar approach creates a dizzying effect, with melodies weaved into rhythmic knots, punctuated by pinging harmonics, warped dissonance, and plenty of shimmering refrains. These songs come pouring out, blanketing hurt in all it shapes with a steadfast resolve, occasionally dejected but persevering the twists and turns.
While the band’s announcement of their album was joined by the unfortunate news that they’d be calling it a day, the finality inherent in the songs aren’t necessarily about Squitch, but more about passing moments that comes with life, the end of one chapter, the start of another. There’s hurt, there’s hope, there’s love, there’s endings, and there’s new beginnings. There’s a feeling that Spooner’s vocals offer empathy to those who need it, there’s a deep understanding in the words directed toward friends. For every crushing feeling experienced there’s a brightness offered, if not always in lyrical presence then in winding progressions, dread becomes swept away, fractured into movable pieces. Songs like “Omen” and “Veronica” offer familiarity in having someone to depend on in tough times, reminders that we’re not alone. There’s comfort in “Cowboy Song,” as Spooner exudes enough confidence for two, drifting apart from the past but holding everything together at the seams. That sense of support is pointed inward as well, captured with brilliant elegance on “Bird of Prey,” a song that spends time in its own head, a reminder that things will make sense in time. It’s a stunning moment, built on shuffling drums and uneasy chord patterns, and the sentiment of it could apply to the record as a whole. We don’t always understand why something is happening and how to move forward, but some things only come into focus well after the dust has settled.