Songwriter Caleb Cordes’ third LP sets aside big hooks for a different kind of immediacy, scaling back reverb and elaborate riffs in favor of a renewed appreciation for taking life as it comes.
Ground Aswim begins as a mystery that demands Caleb Cordes’ full attention, and his bandmates respond in kind; if they played any quieter than they do on “Where Did You Go?” Sinai Vessel couldn’t be called a rock band anymore. There’s a shellshocked quality to Cordes’ voice—like he’s survived either an apocalyptic event or a terrible hangover—as he walks the barren streets of a small town where people never just up and leave. A few memories emerge: an abandoned pair of yellow flip-flops in the middle of the road, an empty classroom chair. When he reaches a dead end, the drums drop out as he mutters the song’s title in private prayer. It’s a moment typically described as a “gut punch,” though he’s the one on the receiving end. Sinai Vessel are only interested in the epiphanies that sneak up on you throughout Ground Aswim, an album that looks back patiently on years of seemingly unremarkable days, only to realize that nothing is the same anymore.
Things don’t happen quickly for Sinai Vessel. Cordes tempted fate by calling his debut Labor Pains; its follow-up was rewritten, remixed, and re-recorded over three and a half years. When Brokenlegged finally arrived on the crest of emo’s turbulent fourth wave, it bore little resemblance to the music that inspired Cordes in 2017. Ground Aswim is more in sync with his current taste for spectral indie folk, a Texas-made album that honors an affinity for Big Thief and Lomelda. As with Hannah, Ground Aswim was recorded in Silsbee at Lazybones Audio with Tommy Read, and it aspires to the tactile, live-room immediacy of the Marfa-born Two Hands. Where Brokenlegged slathered guitars in unruly fuzz and reverb, they’re now as dry and gnarled as petrified wood. If the six-minute perpetual motion machine “Tunneling” doesn’t quite deliver his own “Not,” its searing solo still got him a heretofore implausible mention in Guitar World.
Ground Aswim otherwise forgoes showboating, seemingly as a rebuke to the dense arrangements of Brokenlegged. Cordes sets aside big hooks for a different kind of immediacy, one where each musical choice feels like the product of rigorous and unsparing consideration—a brief string swell during “Fragile,” the clenched-teeth tension of “All Days Just End” released with a crash cymbal beaten until it warps. At every turn, he scrutinizes songwriting choices he may have made in the past: Does that chord need four strings when two will suffice? Is that hi-hat necessary or just a habit? How much more effective would that tambourine be if it was just a few bars, or if a piano riff was actually just one note? What if the chorus only happened once? The quietude of Ground Aswim isn’t only an aesthetic preference—inspired by Cordes’ bouts of tinnitus, “Ringing” is both distorted and eerily muted, emulating the experience of hearing his own band through a debilitating headache.
Rather than projecting outwards towards organized religion or intolerant neighbors, Sinai Vessel’s musical evolution permits Cordes to see his past more clearly. He spends nearly every song on Ground Aswim taking stock of things he didn’t allow himself to fully appreciate: relationships both platonic and romantic, live performance, the time we have each day to be useful to one another. It all comes back to the same fear of a level of commitment that leaves one feeling exposed. “There’s a part of me/That’s been taught/That there’s no consequence when I’m not all in,” Cordes sings on “Shameplant.” Consider Ground Aswim a surgical removal.
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