Echolalia

This one’s been haunting the speakers around here for a few months, finally flooding out into the world this week. Built on a bedrock of Nashville studio heads, including RSTB fave Spencer Cullum (Miranda Lambert, Weird Ears) alongside Andrew Combs (Erin Rae), Dominic Billett (Erin Rae, The Kernal), Jordan Lehning (Kacey Muskgraves), Jason Lehning (The Silver Seas), and Juan Solorzano, Echolalia isn’t light on talent. The band weighs in with a debut album that swerves between pastoral and progressive, slipping from folk bent around an English lilt to German propulsion, and a honeyed touch of Nashville country. Blending these touchstones in the recording process as well, the group decamped from their hometown to Chill Abbey Studios on the Isle of Wight to experiment and improvise what would become their eponymous album. The record feels like a billowing dream, with the listener ushered along their wonder wheel of influences in a series of hazy dissolves and soft focus sparkle.

The band’s untethered spirit could come across as unfocused in lesser hands, but here, the assembled crew catches the winds of genres and finds where they intersect. The album winds up a wondrous mixtape, letting AOR curl in the sun, reaching out with outstretched arms to rifle through familiar flashes of the past while staying anchored to the present in Lehning’s plaintive delivery and Cullum’s woodsmoke embellishments. While I feel this one might get lost among the US crowd, especially within its Anglican eddies, it holds a host of charms for Americana and country folks looking to loosen the laces on their lean on twang. Whether it’s a one off experiment of the start of something more substantial, Echolalia is a necessary docking point along the stream of 2025.

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