Thud-thick rhythms buttress the guitars rippling across the hazy ocean of sound, with a high lonesome vocal floating forth as if a beacon. It’s magical, mystical and all my overused superlatives rolled into one. The Clearwater Swimmers come dancing across the water, in other words, with their guitars and drums. This, their self-titled debut, echoes the electric nirvana that Neil Young created with Crazy Horse after Frank “Poncho” Sampredo signed on. Notes and chords imprint upon the soul. It’s a killer.
The 10-track set opens with “Valley,” which reverberates just as I said above. Ostensibly, it’s a Siddhartha-like parable that hippies past and present will enjoy, though the lyrics are less important than the feel, how the slow-moving rhythm rolls alongside the cascading guitars. The mournful “River” continues the mood while exploring the lingering role the departed play in our lives. “Let Us Be Strangers,” on the other hand, ruminates on a relationship’s peaceful, easy end: “Let us be strangers/Let us be the wind/Blown in two directions/Let us be the wind.”
The band consists of Sumner Bright, who wrote the songs, on lead vocals and guitar; Sander Casale on guitar; Connor Kennedy on backing vocals and bass; and Timothy Graff on drums and percussion. In early May 2024, they recorded nine of the album’s songs over three days at Big Nice Studio in Providence, RI. Bright and Bradford Krieger, who engineered, mixed and mastered, oversaw the production.
Some will undoubtedly compare the band to Sun Kil Moon and Red House Painters, among other folk-flavored bands that have had the “slowcore” label thrust upon them, but there’s also a Gin Blossoms-like underpinning to certain tracks—and, when the deluge of guitars kicks in, Neil and the Horse. (In fact, I’d argue that “slowcore,” “sadcore” and the other related “cores” trace their histories to the Godfather of Grunge’s early daze.
“Proud” and “Man of God” both embrace a low-key Crazy Horse vibe while, to my ears, adding a minor-key melancholia to the mix. The former song is, as the band says in the press release, “Musings on self-destruction.” The latter captures those magical moments when we feel the wind at our back and think we can do no wrong.
I spotlighted “Heaven’s a Bar” upon its release as a single in July. As I noted then, “The warm guitar tones spark a succession of sonic tsunamis through the soul.” “Weathervane” focuses on what the metal totem found on many homes represents, while “Kites” returns heavy guitars to the fore. The latter sounds like an outtake elegy from Neil’s Broken Arrow, just about. The set closes with “Radiant,” a prayer of a tune that Bright—accompanying himself on acoustic guitar—recorded at home in May 2023.
The Old Grey Cat 