One day, will Saintseneca’s new record, Highwallow & Supermoon Songs, do for another worn-down, listless folk musician what painting did for bandleader Zac Little? Toward the end of the 2010s, Little suffered a prolonged period of creative doldrums, thus explaining the seven years or so it took his band to follow up Pillar of Na. Touring and recording and writing and practicing all take a toll; even artists need time to fill their cups, contrary to preconceptions that art is easy and those who make it their vocation are blessed with ever-flowing goblets. (This is very much not the case, for artists as well as for arts and culture critics. We all identify as “tired.”)
It fits that Little plugged into painting to recharge his spirit. Highwallow & Supermoon Songs acts as a great canvas, in part a symptom of its length and in part a symptom of its range; the album clocks in at 79 minutes over 21 total tracks, with individual songs ranging from playful to somber to elegiac to hopeful, in tone and in style. Saintseneca’s habitual instrumental tinkering is well-known. It follows that fiddling about with such acoustics as dulcimers and balalaikas would produce a sound as diverse as the palette and brushstrokes used to evoke panoramic landscapes. Framing the album as more of a gallery whiffs of pretense, because few tools in a critic’s kit are snootier than the casual characterization of one medium using a completely different medium. But Highwallow & Supermoon Songs justifies the comparison through Little’s relationship with painting.
For a clear exemplification of that exchange between the strum of a guitar and the swipe of a brush, give a listen to “Hot Water Song,” the record’s midway point. Those among us with executive functioning challenges may feel as if Little is singing directly to them in the first line (“I keep heating up the same water”), just his voice and his guitar, lamenting both his indecision and his straight-up bad decisions, like eating apples in the Garden of Eden without the need for a snake’s cajoling. This is a man languishing in the morass of inertia. He is alone. It’s easy to imagine this as the start of a painting: patches of color against an ocean of white. Then, subtly, suddenly, Little is joined by percussion, brushes on the drum kit, the charming whine of a lap steel guitar, and the backgrounded voices of his bandmates.
The union changes the song, of course, but changes it so drastically that, if you zone out for even a moment during the track’s five minutes and zone back in on the back half, you may well fool yourself into thinking that you’re listening to a different track entirely. Just like a painting in its nascent stage, “Hot Water Song” begins as sparse and comes together as a rich, layered whole by the time it wraps, a structural motif that repeats throughout the album: “Non Prophet,” for instance, where a conflation appears to be struck between the American insurance industrial complex and God (“Your prophet ought not bend / But it must break even”) and “I Don’t Know Why Double Birthday,” which likewise invokes the divine (“You make a god / You better build mine nice”). Both achieve mellowness by varied degrees; Little belts the lyrics on “Non Prophet” but contemplatively hums them “I Don’t Know Why Double Birthday,” maybe because the former is less reflective and more impassioned–a plea, perhaps, or a dirge for American health and wellbeing.
Not every track on Highwallow & Supermoon Songs follows that pattern, building up to a group performance from what kicks off effectively as solo work: “Bitter Suite” gets into the “rock” side of “folk rock” right away, recalling the sound of such sixties bands as the Grass Roots filtered through a low key grunge lens; “Smoke Punching” ambles with an easygoing swagger, making philosophical broadcasts about the self-inflicted wounds of one’s youth coming back to haunt them later on in life. If these tracks stay more or less in one mode from their opening moments until their conclusions, and therefore lack the meta-textual qualities of, say, “Non Prophet,” they remain of a piece with Highwallow & Supermoon Songs’ identity as a nearly painterly album, realized in bold and declarative brushstrokes rather than in smaller, precise ones.
There’s another side to the record too, unrelated to Little’s efforts at retrieving his lost groove: this isn’t a tracklist about road tripping, but it is about journeys, and movement, all of which he and the rest of the band keep in mind as they ready to take Highwallow & Supermoons Songs on tour for the first time. Consequently, the total experience of listening to these songs is something like exhaustion. It’s a long record, in length as well as in sonic complexities; you may risk falling asleep at the wheel steering yourself to its final tune. But who cares? A brisk, sturdy adventure is good for the heart. It’s good for artists, too, and their artistry, and for Little, whose songwriting, at least as inspired by painting, has brought him to a new creative place in Saintseneca’s history.
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can find his collected work at “his personal blog.” He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.
