Lady Catastrophe is a 10-track LP broadly about what you do with yourself after the end of the world. It’s on bandcamp here and through all streaming services here. Stylistically, the album vacillates between folk, indie, and art rock. Thematically, it straddles the personal and political, both mythic and of-its-moment. Process-wise, it was a good time in a small room.
The lead track opens with a long whistle leading into an air raid and an atom blast. In the long winds, you hear a tinkle of banjo, a few distorted bars of singing. The drums drop in and you’re propelled through this long, eight-minute track, Here Comes Catastrophe, that acts as this kind of fever dream of cultural disintegration. As Lady Catastrophe descends, we’re hearing this rapid fire litany of all the ways our technological power is exploding while our cultural power atrophies. The outro rings, the beginning’s near, the beginning’s near.
By the end of the disc, you’re back where you started, as the audience’s applause falls apart into familiar blast winds, an ominous church bell, and the melodic forethought of that long whistle from the beginning.
In between, we go through:
- Little Thunderstrokes: a short and sweet meditation on watching your child gather self-awareness.
- Judith Shakespeare: an ode to the mythic heroine postulated by Virgnia Woold in A Room of One’s Own.
- Giver: about what happens when a woman is pushed too far.
- American Loneliness: a mythic journey through a disintegrating cultural landscape. In three verses, a trio of folk wanderers follows through the age of information’s collapse, where the wire killed the highway, past the void king and his army of identical individualists, until they are back where they started, somewhat less real to themselves.
- Sophia: when the loved one finally returns, too late to be loved again.
- Beast Ain’t Sleeping: a political howl at the inhumanity greeting the world’s growing migrant class.
- Alludica Patiens: a short instrumental, set to a muffled poem on the physical disc (omitted from streaming).
- Hammerfall: a nostalgic, piano driven tune on the breakdown of the class system, a tribute to your own downfall.
- Hell Dust: an ecstatic ode to running out of options, and just reveling in your addictions.
Thanks for listening. I hope it warms some little corner of your imagination.