Submerse Yourself in Sister Swimmer’s Soft, Melancholy Debut EP
Rarely do debuts sound as assured as Sister Swimmer’s The Horizon Line Swallowed Us Whole, a quartet of songs transmitted from the bottom of the lake. The EP introduces singer-songwriter Britt Amborn as a natural at turning her demons into dioramas. The sound (produced by songwriting collaborator Nicholas Ward and engineered by Mike Vernon Davis) is suitably lush, and that the contributors, from Austen Case’ backing vocals and Colin Richey’s drumming on “No : Body” to Jeremiah Moon and his cello work on the EP’s back half, inject a little grandiosity into Amborn’s compositions.
They also imbue each song with its own sonic identity. “Fruit Seed Apocalypse Dream,” for instance, cruises down the I-70’s summer sunset amid cavernous drums, while “Monster Song” climaxes with brittle drum programming and Moon’s cello. Neither are quite like “No : Body” and its straightforward indie rock angst, nor “Knuckles” widescreen string-laden balladry. It makes the EP feel like a disparate collection of songs that might otherwise feel disconnected were it not for Amborn’s quavering voice and malleable diction, her big stamp on the project.
Besides, what truly ties the songs together are the sharp images and revelations her voice outlines. Amborn takes a poet’s approach to lyric writing, in that her lines are heavy on metaphor and resist the withering effect lyrics tend to have on the page. She’s laser-focused on a handful of subjects: interpersonal (and intrapersonal) tension, combating the past, embodying contradiction. “Too much/Not enough” goes the chorus of “No : Body”; on “Fruit Seed” she’s both a monsoon and a dust devil, water and fire.
The overarching mood of the EP is melancholy, but sadness in music takes many forms; the shadow that Amborn inhabits here is warm enough to be shade on a hot summer day, and yet it’s also accompanied by a requisite poise, a cruelly mandated dose of verse-chorus accessibility, for in what better way could the grand struggle central to these four songs be embodied? Of acknowledging the self-destructiveness inherent in passivity - in shrinking yourself down to lift others up - and yet feeling unable to truly change?