Merce Lemon
When asked how the city of Pittsburhg has inspired her creative practice, she responds with a characteristic joke wrapped in an earthen warmth – “There are big hills, three rivers, and more bridges than anywhere in the whole world.” Growing up in a family of art and music in a city with a small, but vigorously supportive scene, Merce has been going to shows here her whole life, even playing them with the “grown up” friends of her parents – as recently as a few years ago, her band was comprised of her own father and his peers in the Pittsburgh music community.

Merce took a step back in 2020, after releasing her last album Moonth, to reassess during an era of anxiety and lockdown – even the reliably nourishing exercise of releasing and playing music felt precarious. “I was grappling with what kind of relationship I wanted with music in my life. It was just something I’d always done, and I didn't want to lose the magic of that – but I was just having less fun.” In this time of restless confusion, she turned her gaze inwardly, down to the roots – figuratively and literally. 

“I got dirty and slept outside most of the summer. I learned a lot about plants and farming, just writing for myself, and in that time I just slowly accumulated songs.” A never-ending creative hunger, supported by the community framework she’d always been able to depend on, had been newly fertilized by the wide-eyed inspiration that came from plunging her hands into both the earth’s soil and her own. Rooting around for an answer, finding and turning in her palms what had been buried there all along – from this rediscovery, imbued with the vitality of earth’s green magic, Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild sprouted forth.

The album emerges, enveloped in propulsive guitars and saccharine-sweet songs of blackbirds and blueberries, from the dead-calm center of a pastoral frenzy in a manner that one could argue as erratic, reckless — a grave misunderstanding, as Merce is just as aware of where she’s being pulled from as she is curious about where to go next. Her sound is built from a reverence and gratitude for the natural world, how paying respect to it charts a clearer path through the choppy waters of the heart. “I can see your relentlessness / in the muddy puddles where retting is / shattering the splintered stalks / where golden braids pour into drops." 

They are songs of belonging just as much as they are songs of longing – ”Say I was a lonely gust of wind / could I redirect them,” she muses in “Crow”, forgoing the voyeur in all of our hearts, hoping only to help direct the “murderous flock” as they help direct her. In this music, romantic and familial love rips into and out of itself, barely registering as disparate feelings in a flurry of reckoning. Do not make the mistake of ascribing a gentle nature to these songs, nor Merce herself. There is a fierceness, a persistence in this vulnerability, that is matched in droves by the wildness of her band. In “Backyard Lover,” the strength of reconciling the quiet conflict of a desire for closeness and solitude in equal parts – “I don't get out much / is being swallowed by a room supposed to feel this way? / Maybe i'll come out / babe” – is complemented with the gritted promise of “Foolish and Fast” to plow through mountain highways in search of a respite from heartache — “And my love just passing through you / foolish and fast.” For Merce, the only certainty is an endless questioning, roaring straight past a dogwood, never missing the opportunity to watch a petal fluttering to the ground in the rear view.

There is an oaken warmth in Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild that makes it easy to love –  once wild, still free, honest and familiar. Its genesis is timeless, its restlessness eternal – it is one cohesive yet unanswered question built around, and dependent upon, the life-giving force of nature that came before Merce. The album’s closing track also inspires its title – a lonely ballad of forlorn projection into an unknown future, forever protected by the comforting green of Pittsburgh’s hills, rivers, bridges, and homes:

https://mercelemon.bandcamp.com/
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Greg Freeman deals in biblical deluges, apocalyptic fever dreams, Floridian miscreants, and green mountain malaise. On his excellent debut LP “I Looked Out”, Gregs’s voice takes center stage, creaking, crooning, and cutting through clouds of static. The songs are linked together by a palpable urgency, whether it is the punch-in-the-face, careening momentum of “Tower,” the guitar squall of “Souvenir Heart,” or the singalong finale of “Palms.” Greg’s strong narrative songwriting is equally effective chronicling the demise of a 1920s ocean liner as it is documenting his own interpersonal uncertainties. Based in Burlington, Vermont, the songwriter has played in numerous bands in the city's burgeoning DIY scene. While the marriage of Freeman’s fierce guitar playing and vocals catalyze his live performance, horns, pedal steel, and strings take his songs to an unfamiliar and blustering landscape, and places you right in the middle of some dusty brass-laden crossroads.
https://gregfreeman1.bandcamp.com/