Sounds like: Quirky folk; compare to Sufjan Stevens, Parenthetical Girls, Danielson Famile
Top Tracks: “Splashdowns Hold the Hymnal Together,” “Fresh & Bitter from the Same Spring”
The full title for the fifth album by this free spinning, ecstatic giggles-inducing musical project—which wouldn’t fit in the header above—is officially As Stowaways in Cabinets of Surf, We Live-out in Our Members a Kind of Rebirth. The press kit lays out a laundry list of influences, from the Beatles’ White Album to Winslow Homer paintings. The crux of these part folk/part outsider artist expressions, though, comes from the Scriptures’ use of water as a metaphor for God. Using that as a fulcrum, lead Cloud John Ringhofer spins out 25 short songs that feel as slippery as liquid, but are kept earthbound by heady arrangements heavy on banjo, ukulele, and chattering percussion, and lyrics that could be the subject of a doctoral dissertation about the use of symbolism.
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