Day for Nights

This week brings an excellent new album from local favorite Karen Schoemer (Sky Furrows, Jaded Azurites) and guitarist Zak Boerger (These Wonderful Evils) with help from Dan Bitney (Tortoise), Mike Watt (Minutemen/ fIREHOSE) and a few other friends. Eschewing the sonic heft of her recent work with the Furrows, the new record was built on the scaffolding and sinews of Boerger’s guitar parts, written in the summer of 2022 just prior to a cancer diagnosis that spurred the collaboration in a more urgent direction. Not knowing if he’d be able to hear the final forms of the songs, Schoemer set to work pairing poems with the songs. Themes of isolation and loss permeated the batch, no doubt fresh in mind from recent years, but also informed by the sense of time slipping away, gnawed at the edges by disease.

Karen’s sense of lyrical weight bleeds over from her work with Sky Furrows, juxtaposing the familiar with the fanciful, draping her words in a hallucinatory veil to dull the pain and escape the encroaching inevitable. The album adopts feelings of the late ‘60s bleeding into the early ‘70s. Starting with a aura of psych-folk, the pair fuse the drip and drape of Pentagle, Trees, and Fairport. The album then arcs towards the frayed edges of psych, prog, and nascent punk, nipping through VU, Ithaca, Patti Smith and Rosi-era Ash Ra Tempel territory. The record’s origins are buoyed with the knowledge that Boerger’s treatments were ultimately successful, and he was not only able to experience the results but to build upon Karen’s work with some further additions of his own, enlisting a cadre of others to overdub and expand the album into its final form with guitars, double bass, and drums.

The record joins contemporary works from Sunburned Hand of the Man, Stella Kola, Modern Nature, and Henry Parker in capturing a spirit of the ‘60s that often gets swept aside in favor of performative psychedelics and pastiche. Yet, this is a psychedelic work. It’s an album that lets the mind wander through hedge mazes of guitar while Schoemer’s words sketch scenes in the cumulus above. Perfect for the coming chill, Days For Nights offers endless vistas to saunter over the coming months. No break appears in the bleakness ahead of us, no closer on the casualties behind us. Feels like we’re all gonna need to slip into the ecstasy and ardor of Days For Nights right about now.

Support the artist. Buy it HERE.