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| Photo courtesy of the band |
I wanna know what’s really on your mind.
I gotta know who’s at the reins this time.
Are you a fortress, are you defenseless?
You were never a prophet, but you got a few things right.
There are a million of sayings about the month of March, but all of them — lions, lambs, anything involving showers and flowers, though that might be April and May, I’m having kind of a week here — are what the debut EP, Wake of Waking, from Oregon’s Grand Lake Islands sounds like. A little rainy, and a little sunny, and a little sad, and a little hopeful. March is a weird month, because nobody hates it as much as everyone hates February, but that doesn’t make it an easy month, either.
In “Greenwood”, when frontman Eric Emanuelson sings, now you’re spinning in the rubble like a half smoked cigarette, dissolving slowly, oh so slowly in a puddle: that’s March. It’s puddles and reflections, this record, it’s guitars and mandolins that sound like the rain hitting my window today. It’s shivering and sad, and it gets a more than a few things right, this song, and this EP. It sounds like spring and it feels like winter, or vice versa.
Wake of Waking is available at Grand Lake Islands’ Bandcamp page for streaming (free) or purchase (the low low price of $4). Look for their full length debut later this spring, and listen to this song and sigh a little bit, sad and hopeful.