Scions

An interesting record to review in light of the current week. The overarching themes of Scions’ debut center on “a post-apocalyptic humanity relearning and recreating itself, after a total ecological collapse.” Singer and lyricist Cormac Culkeen has noted that “It is a rallying cry to wholeheartedly fight a losing battle.” While the coming years are now almost certain to find ecological collapse accelerated, the sentiment should hold for so many other battlefronts to come. It’s an album of resilience in the face of impossible odds, a shove in the direction of a fool’s errand made with resolve. The goals are clear but the paths are fraught. We are not fools (well some of us aren’t) but the work to carve Sisyphus a stray path is long and almost certainly driven through the dark.

The band gathered to ruminate on the themes and in the process sought to tear down the genre walls. The album’s core is somewhere between folk and jazz, but its more akin to the kind of fluid fare that once found itself the bedrock of Constellation and Arts & Crafts Records. Ideas crest and curl in the album, static thrums and consumes samples of speech. Spoken word pieces unfurl on the title track. “Who would want to bring a child into this time of terrible unease and uncertainty?” ponders Culkeen, before taking a deeper look at why the desire is not as futile as it might seem. Amid the noise, drone, choral swells, creeping jazz, and fierce crescendos, Scions come to terms with the maelstrom. “I still have hope for a better world. I still have hope in spite of myself,” intones Culkeen, summing up the album’s core struggle. Whether we’ll survive the storms remains to be seen, but the Canadian collective has provided a few anthems for the journey.

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