“Who was in the kitchen leaving all the drawers open? / Who bites things and puts them back?” they sing on “Velcro,” which starts with a five-count bass drum thump. “Vanity loves ritual / Hand to mouth, zip-tie / velcro.” It’s a song about looking for a guide, while the guide is hiding the whole time in the everyday. A song reflective of the whole albums’ Whitman-esque melange.

“I got but one question before we part / Which arrow hits its mark? / And does it fly for good now?” they open the album. And these songs hit the mark, with their music that is at once simple and evocative, and their lyrics which are at once… simple and evocative. Album single, “Sitting on the Porch At Night,” for example, takes a simple night and gets deep. “Sitting on the porch at night / I think of all the things I got / I think of all the food I threw away.” They have a way at capturing the inner and outer life in tandem.

Like the other single they released pre-album, they “pour sugar in our shoes,” and make the journey a little bit more bearable, with their hooks and insights. Perhaps my favorite song on the album is the album closer, “Bucket of Gold,” which talks about their great grandpa who buried a bucket of gold under the house, (“a deep image of paradise / never disrupt the perfect order,”) but who has all the wrong times on his household appliances. It captures the feeling of beautiful dissonance we all experience in life. “Over and over, what’s real? / A hand reaching towards the sun.”

We reach for meaning and barely grasp it, we are simultaneously rich and poor, in things and in personal value. The music is the perfect vehicle for inquiry and observation, often wistful, often charming. Often dissonant, like the lyrics. This album is a work of art, if you take the time to dig, like they took the time to dig into their own life’s and find the meaning in what life offered up day by day to them. “I was waiting for / something to hold / Thought I heard a bird call.” In the elusive quest for meaning, perhaps what we find is even more beautiful than what we expected to find.

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