Style: experimental rock, noise rock, post-rock, post-punk, avant-folk (mixed vocals, spoken word)
Recommended for fans of: Sprain, Swans, A Silver Mount Zion, Slint, Maruja, Talk Talk
Country: California, United States
Release date: 1 May 2025

Stitched together out of thousands of hours of studio recordings, Talk Talk’s 1988 painstakingly crafted masterpiece, Spirit of Eden, was a landmark album for post-rock. The band sat in a blacked out room equipped with an oil projector and strobe light twelve hours a day for several months, listening to the same six tracks on repeat; session musicians would jam for hours on end only for Talk Talk to use mere seconds of the result; and the group recorded with a twenty-five person choir only to decide “nah, this ain’t it.” Spirit of Eden is a mosaic, and the tiles are treasures plundered from endless hours of tapes. That the project came together as seamlessly as it did is remarkable—one could not listen to Spirit of Eden for the first time and discern that it was sutured together note by note.

To create their debut record Motherfucker, I Am Both: “Amen” and “Hallelujah”…, Shearling—born out of the recently defunct noisy post-rock band Sprain—have similarly sewn together segments from hundreds of hours of largely improvisational recordings. The result is a single, monolithic (Motherfucker is a single sixty-two minute track) slab of noisy post-rock, avant-folk, and obnoxious British post-punk.

Motherfucker is cinematic in scope, driven by the lyrics which cover a bifurcated narrative—one side about Idaho; the other, Eden. Prosaic yet poetry, the wordsmithing is intriguing with the two stories weaving in and out of each other in a stream-of-consciousness rambling. Occasionally, the poetry touches on brilliant. Highlights include: “And the spots on our Appaloosa¹ hide / Might be mistaken for constellations at night / By obligated stars and half-imagined lines / Splattered intentionally there against the night sky” and the vulgar honesty of “I know I’m naked / Eve’s cunt obscured now / By the branch of a huckleberry bush / Adam’s cock now / So tightly sheathed by a palm frond / Before the mirror I too place a hand over / My little Appaloosa / Tucked silently away in his little stable.” The storyline reads as an allegory for queer shame from growing up in Idaho—the Appaloosa taking on an apotheosized and subverted role². The intricate symbolism is maddeningly dense, however, and some of the literary devices are implemented on the amateurish side, albeit fitting the crazed descent into madness of the storytelling.

The bard of this chaotic story, Alexander Kent, provides an impassioned vocal performance that will make or break the album for many. His first vocal entry after the first 4:00 of instrumental noodling, dissonance, and feedback is an incredibly unpleasant moan. From there, he ranges from dramatic spoken word to the rambled shouting of a madman, from operatic croons to gruff, almost-growled barks and wailing moans. His voice drips with pain—maybe some malice—from years of shame and stigma, and the screams can be cathartic (the intermittent large climaxes are the prime examples), but for an unfortunate portion of the time, Kent’s atonal shouts and vocal deliveries are grating, horrific for listening; he needs to save the aggressive shouts for the crescendos lest they ruin their gravitas… which they certainly do. The godawful singing fits the vulgarity and verisimilitude of the lyrics, but Kent should focus on a more subtle delivery when the music calls for it. 

The music on Motherfucker traverses a diverse range of influences. The record is spliced together from a mix of phone-recorded demos, jams, live recordings, and traditional studio sessions, Shearling carefully attempted to put together the recordings into a cohesive sonic epic à la Talk Talk… emphasis on attempted, though. The songwriting of Motherfucker transcends stream-of-consciousness into the nonsensical. Climaxes materialize out of nowhere; Pharoah Sanders-esque saxophone parts or home-made Gamelan bells are equally as likely to be played by Shearling; ethereal industrial styles reminiscent of Lingua Ignota make their appearances in between the abrasive noise rock; and non-Western drumming styles may transition into glitchy electronic beats. Nary a consideration is made for transitions, either. Even the final five minutes after the final epic climax—the clear high point of the album is from 38-46 minutes as the bass pulsations lead into increasingly potent doses of screaming and crushing instrumentals—feel like they have little thought put into how they fit into the flow, with flatulent, deflated horns and some final random screams closing out the track. Shearling ensure the listener never knows what’s coming next.

Producing an album sewn from several different recording methods proves difficult for Shearling, too. Unlike Spirit of Eden which feels impossible to know was blended together as it was, Motherfucker’s collage never coalesces completely. Whatever instrumental section currently backs the vocals is unduly emphasized in the mix, and the clash of dynamics and styles renders Motherfucker a disappointingly and disjointedly assembled album. Shearling achieved an opus as haywired as it is intense, yet they get lost in the sauce doing so, the songwriting too scatterbrained for its own good. 

Many post-rock albums have suffered from over-ambition in the past forty years, and Motherfucker suffers for it, too; yet, Shearling have certainly achieved something admirable here—granted, over-long, insane, and extremely challenging (and frankly painful). To improve on the deep compositional flaws, Shearling ought to look back to Spirit of Eden. Finally, that Motherfucker is part one of a massive two-part epic must be mentioned. Clearly, Shearling are overflowing with ideas—hundreds of hours of them—so I hope they manage to restrain themselves without losing the ambitious charm so central to their identity.

Recommended tracks: it’s a one track album…
You may also like: Cime, Natural Snow Buildings, Ken Mode, Sumac & Moor Mother
Final verdict: 4/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram

Label: independent

Shearling is:
Alexander Kent: Vocals, Engineering, Production, Cover Art Design, Guitar, Synthesizer, Trombone, Samples, Hammered Dulcimer, Banjo, Harmonium, Accordion, Singing Saw, Percussion, Taishogoto, Organ, Glockenspiel, Mellotron, Mandolin, Autoharp, Piano, Bells
Sylvie Simmons: Guitar, Synthesizer, Organ, Hi-C Programming, Samples
With guests:
Wes Nelson: Bass, Upright Bass
Andrew “Hayes” Chanover: Drums
Rachel Kennedy: Vocals
Mate Tulipan: Tenor Saxophone, Trombone
Ian Thompson: Alto Saxophone

1. The state horse of Idaho with a splotchy hindquarters resembling a Dalmatian. ︎
2. I mean, check out that album cover. In the context of this being a queer narrative, it is certainly striking. ︎

The post Review: Shearling – Motherfucker, I Am Both: “Amen” and “Hallelujah”… appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Genres: Avant-Folk, Progressive Rock, Chamber Jazz (Clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Joanna Newsom, Devin Townsend & Ché Aimee Dorval’s Casualties of Cool, Iamthemorning
Country: Illinois, USA
Review by: Christopher
Release date: 1 March 2024

I find myself more and more taken with folk, having got into some Joanna Newsom and David Crosby (and his various collaborators) recently, or going back to my ongoing flirtations with the vaguely folkish alterna-rock of City and Colour, as well as the more overtly prog and metal interpretations of the sound: the lilting flavours of blackened Borknagar, the manic fusion of Subterranean Masquerade, and the new age meets prog meets americana of Casualties of Cool. Something about the authentic grit of folk—its communion with the pastoral, its reckoning with the vicissitudes of life—always pulls me back. 

Hailing from Illinois, Hannah Frances is a solo folk artist working with a series of session musicians, and Keeper of the Shepherd, her sophomore album, resides on the folk side, not the prog side of the spectrum—drawing from Newsom and Joni Mitchell rather than from the likes of Orphaned Land. That’s right, I’m once again asking you – Bernie meme style – to step outside your comfort zones. With a rich timbre and precise vibrato, poetic lyrics that eschew stanza structures in favour of emotional streams-of-consciousness, a distinct fingerstyle rooted in the open tunings of folk (for those more unusual harmonic resonances) but embracing polyrhythmic complexities dazzling in their nuance and strangeness, Keeper of the Shepherd may not be your traditional prog rock, but it’s unabashedly progressive in outlook.

“Bronwyn”, for example, features characteristically gorgeous vocals, but underneath the guitar riff is impossibly intricate—I think there’s a lot of 6/4 and 5/4 being moved around in strange ways but trying to work it out gave me a headache; no wonder it took a year for Frances to write it. Distorted guitar moves in around the edges as the song pushes in post-rock fashion to its jangling latter reaches, sounding like the halfway point between Porcupine Tree and Mazzy Star in these moments. The somewhat jaunty mute-heavy rhythm of the title track, meanwhile, belies the fact that Frances is crooning about the death of her father, a grief that suffuses much of the record. Soft pedal steel laments in the background like a mournful train call in the night, and the vocal harmonies hit a layered crescendo, a dozen voices raised in pain, the instruments succumbing to grim resignation as the song doesn’t conclude so much as falls apart. 

At some junctures, Frances seems to tickle around the edges of homage: “Floodplain’s” main guitar motif is redolent of the progression in “Blackbird” by The Beatles, but Frances’ vocal melodies move in counterpoint, diverging and converging with the rhythm as brief battalions of strings attack at the edges before a sustained assault on the song’s mid-section. Meanwhile, the languid chords of “Husk” recall Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No.1”, as voice and violin perform to one another, driving to a complex layering of harmonies that build to a choral, funereal climax. 

Woodwinds, provided by Hunter Diamond, play around the margins on many of the tracks, as on “Vacant Intimacies” which crescendos post-rock style while saxophones noodle away above with jazzlike disregard for theoretical concerns, and closer “Haunted Landscape, Echoing Cave” which, after the rhythmically distinct verses and choruses, explodes into a kaleidoscopic chamber jazz instrumental, capping off the album with a sense of fullness, as though the entire record had been leading to this more complete sound. A resolution of sorts, a new start, light at the end of mourning. These two may well be my favourite tracks, the more reserved and stripped back middle third of the album admittedly not really matching my more maximalist prog fancies, but I’d be hard pressed to find any real problems with Keeper of the Shepherd; Frances has her vision under perfect control. 

No, this isn’t your traditional prog rock, but Keeper of the Shepherd absolutely deserves the ear of the more folk-minded fans who lurk around our site. Composed with a perfect balance of complexity and melody, lovingly mixed, and with turbid emotions roiling freely, this is an album whose intricacies and excellent guest musicians are perfectly suited to evoke the record’s central spiritual burdens. As the evenings draw out and hope begins to eke out a place in the cold soil, let Hannah Frances shepherd you into the spring. 

Recommended tracks: Bronwyn; Vacant Intimacies; Haunted Landscape, Echoing Cave
You may also like: Mingjia, Lack the Low, Courtney Swain, Evan Carson
Final verdict: 8/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Label: Ruination Record Co. – Bandcamp

Hannah Frances is:
– Hannah Frances (music, lyrics, guitar, vocals, production)

The post Review: Hannah Frances – Keeper of the Shepherd appeared first on The Progressive Subway.