Eyes of the Amaryllis - Sift

Horn of Plenty hits the ground running in 2022, servicing us terrible people with two albums before we've even seen January out the door. I suspect this will be a common feature of much of the year, the release schedules of the smaller labels being pushed together as the vinyl delays from 2021 all start to clear at the same time... Well anyway, last year's absence is this year's bounty... The first of that bounty is this debut LP from Eyes of the Amaryllis, a perfectly shadowy, People Skills-adjacent four-piece from Philadelphia, who you'll remember from that unusually packaged tape on Cor Ardens. Not dissimilar to that tape, Sift is an ethereal, driftless and ocassionally atonal confluence of convivial experimentalism. There's four people making noise here, though they do so with such a soft, thoughtful touch it's as if they're a single organism. Where they end up is somewhat undeterminable and originless, existing in the interzone between the freak folk of, say, White Magic, the fractured compositional work of someone like The Books and murky underground of 90s cassette culture ala Xpressway/Shadow Ring et al. If you were to take post-rock at its word, this is probably what it should sound like - not an amalgamation of the classicist elements of hardcore, shoegaze and krautrock, but instead a razing to the ground of structural convention infavour of an emotion-led anti-formalism. A new folk song, in its own intimate way, born of private understanding and anti-orthodoxy.