by Rohan Press (rohanpress@gmail.com)
I usually have to shift down to first gear to make it out my steep driveway. Tense, both hands on the wheel, grasping for control but never finally having it—that’s the sound of The Clearwater Swimmers’ smoldering sophomore EP Seasons. “Go on, shift it down,” songwriter Sumner Bright impels me. I do. I let the engine, the thing that’s supposed to propel me, slow me down instead, hold me tenuously.
I think that’s what much of Sumner’s songs, part Bedhead, part Jason Molina, are about: “the passion and fallout of choosing to have a dream or ambition,” as he’s put it. How what ‘drives’ us can so quickly snap back—the exhaust working overtime. On “Landline,” rolling in and out with Sander Casale’s guitar swells, Sumner tells the story of an aspiring film director beaten down by his own “hungry star in the mirror.” “The reject ties a landline,” Sumner tells us; he heads home.
In the face of that kind of burnout, the EP’s surreally pastoral cover art by Rosa Sawyers, at first seems almost impudent, like a mocked childhood reverie. And yet we cannot dismiss that reverie, because it continues to mean so much, even in its disappointment. The radio flyer wagon, at the center of the image, is the perfect, blue-shifted symbol for something at once precious and heavy. “Radio flyer carries / all of the things that make me,” Sumner sings on “Radio.” “Getting hard to pull it through.”
So when Sumner asks me to “shift it down” (performed as much as described by Connor Kennedy’s brilliantly staggering bassline), he means, I think, to acknowledge that heaviness and to go slow with it. But it is also an affirmation of a voltage underneath all that resignation. You can hear it all over these songs—a melodic nerve, an engine “revving loud.” And why shouldn’t it? After all, making it down the hill is often harder than climbing up.