by Katie Stollmack (@katiestollmack)
The Lentils’ new album, takin’ it easy the hard way begins slow and swingin’. Singer Luke Csehak’s Dylan-esque croon runs through the titular song, paired with an off-beat tambourine and a gentle rhythm section. Cryptic lines like “Won’t u show me to the ceiling / Where I like to do my healing / Like the bread of the zero wakin' up” create a magical and surreal atmosphere, but they pair with universal images—clutter, the smell of rain, prudes, and bruises. The opening track sets the tone for a folksier sound than we’ve seen in their more recent work, a mellowed out but still deeply rich.
Following the first melancholy track is “from the fields that all tropes fear,” a letter in the form of a song. It’s a thank you to an unnamed figure, someone who has a long and complicated history with the narrator, a history of “sloppy…memories” and disappointing summers. Despite all the pain evoked in the verses, the song both begins and ends with thanks and welcoming. The instrumentation is a pastiche of percussion that ends in a wonderfully disordinate waterfall of sound.
The lyrics of the entire album are tied together by a sense of love lost. Not always romantic, but every song seems to address a lost loved one, a failed dream. Some songs heavily employ second-person pronouns to speak directly to the subject, while others dance around it through images of flames burnt out and limp dollar bills.
“old shipley glen road (trad.)” takes its melody from a traditional Irish composition. The lyrics, too, are aware of an artistic tradition in a way that diverges from the album’s other, more obscure lyrics. An “earthly plea” and “the merry hills of May” call back to the Romantic poets, while the breaking up of the subject’s body into distinct parts harkens to the early British Modernists. Paired with a shaky harp melody, the song traverses the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, universalizing heartbreak across time and nation.
I was once again reminded of Bob Dylan in the song “country woman blues.” The title recalls “Girl from the North Country,” so does the drawn-out croon of the word “country” in every other line of the chorus. The song is a journey, with tambourine mirroring footsteps and horns playing along. Csehak’s lyrics are vague and contradictory, just as the emotions they convey. “Water is actually the dryest thing in the world,” and “Mike’s Hard” is replaced with “champagne.” The story is there but the details don’t quite line up. Without saying it outright, the song has created a tale of red-hot passion and distance, of joy and pain. The contradictions in the lyrics are those of loss and the love that came before.
The album ends, as it should, with an ending. The final track, “the last last time” ties together the themes that underlie the entire album. The song’s narrator is accepting of the end, of the changing seasons and the disappearance of the song’s subject into the “tall tall grass.” Although this song has tastes of resistance, it ends with acceptance. It is “the truth,” although it is hard to say, that “this is the last last time.” She is gone, whoever she is, that all of these songs spoke to. She has followed us through time, space, and genre, but she is gone. We’ve known it throughout the entire album. The narrator is finally letting go of the source of all this pain, learning the hard way how to take it easy.