If Esmerine

If three composers can be considered a supergroup, then Sarah Neufeld and Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire and Bell Orchestre) and Rebecca Foon (Esmerine, Saltland, Thee Silver Mt. Zion) fit the definition. They first improvised together in Montreal back in 1999, but didn’t record their efforts; a quarter century later, recalling the instinctive magic of those sessions, they reunited and pressed Record. First Sounds is both a reflection of those early sessions, viewed through the lens of time, and the first installment of a new and hopefully ongoing chapter. One might liken it to the thrill of reuniting with one’s first love, discovering that the chemistry is as strong as ever.

Siskiyou returns from a four-year hiatus with Not Somewhere, an album that finds band leader Colin Huebert (ex-Great Lake Swimmers) essentially in solo artist mode, writing and self-recording this new collection of tunes on his own, playing all the guitar, bass, keyboard and drum parts himself. Not Somewhere harkens back to Siskiyou’s magical and understated 2010 self-titled debut in this and other ways: the album’s production rekindles a homespun intimacy, where plain-spoken lyrics grapple with portraits of quiet quotidian despair, fragile existential horizon lines separating perseverance and defeatism, honest and unremarkable lives trapped in cultures of false consciousness, impossible desire, self-analysis and self-medication.