LEAN YEAR – sides (CD, LP Vinyl)

There is a moment on the new album from Richmond, Virginia-based duo, in which a hospital room floor is filled with white chrysanthemums. This imagery, based on an opiate-induced hallucination experienced by vocalist Emilie Rex's mother as she recovered from surgery, is a perfect encapsulation of the band's second album: dreamlike and beautiful, yet burdened with cold, stark reality. Sides is a harrowing journey through realms of grief and memory, a meditation woven into a tapestry of synth pads, woodwinds, and Rex's instantly recognizable voice.The duo of Rex and Rick Alverson-who also works as a film director (The Mountain, Entertainment, The Comedy)-originally set out to write an album about conflict, but during the writing and recording process, they were confronted with a number of personal tragedies. Alverson lost both of his parents in rapid succession, Rex's mother received a cancer diagnosis, and the couple's beloved family dog, Orca, died. These events transformed the album into an exploration of loss-an attempt at processing the painful, complex, and private emotions that bubble to the surface when confronted with death. "We thought we'd do a concept album called Sides where we could reflect on all of the division in the world, and some in our own families, but then COVID transformed everything/everyone, and we suffered our own specific losses. The record became about loss and grief," Rex explains." In this way, the title Sides was still appropriate: our individual grief and collective grief, the margins of before and after, the act and feeling of during and enduring." Alverson adds, "It felt like straddling a threshold between two opposing sides-the moment before conflict and the moment after it passes, life and death, the act of living and the memory of the act. Grief feels like a contention between what you knew and what you now know, and often both feel real and unreal at once." *Western Vinyl