Darlingside – Everything Is Alive
Everything Is Alive, Darlingside’s fourth LP, marks a subtle but remarkable departure for the Boston-based quartet NPR once described as “exquisitely arranged, literary minded, baroque folk-pop.” While the album retains much of the lushness and sophistication of Extralife (2018) and Fish Pond Fish (2020), the band’s latest work decisively exposes and differentiates the individual voices of the four songwriters—a daring reinvention for a group known for ubiquitous vocal harmonies. Grappling with change both personal and universal, with quandaries domestic and existential, Everything Is Alive is an album about loss and the struggle for a semblance of redemption.
Comprised of Don Mitchell, Auyon Mukharji, Harris Paseltiner and David Senft, four likeminded multi-instrumentalists who first met at Williams College in 2009, Darlingside’s career has been defined by the elegance of their compositions and the unity of their four voices. Their talent for harmony and melodic world-building is part of what garnered praise from outlets like NPR, Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, and what has created demand worldwide for their extraordinary live performances. Becoming beautifully unindividualized has, in other words, worked very well for Darlingside in the past. With a vigor and discipline more common to graduate-level writing workshops than to indie rock, Darlingside has, over the years, experimented with all manners of idiosyncratic methods for elevating and upholding a truly democratic process of songwriting—processes that include multiple rounds of group writing and recording exercises—all with the aim of escaping the trap that bands with multiple songwriters often fall into: ego-driven infighting and artistic incoherence.
Vivid images and striking turns of phrase abound on Everything Is Alive. Expectations are commonly inverted or exploded—exploded curiously, with nuance, but exploded no less—as in these lines from “All The Lights In The City”: maybe working is what makes us live, or maybe it’s living/sky is always hanging blue above the cloud/but the path of no resistance will wear you out. On “Sea Dogs,” the track that contains the album’s title, Paseltiner sings over an effervescent dreamscape: I can’t wake up all the time/or even half the time or/even be on time. Such lines capture the disorientation and desperation that pervade this album. And yet, later in the same song, come the lines which align poignantly with the song’s dreamy sonic context: when up in the clouds are sea dogs/and kites and big white basketballs/the backyard is thickening/ how is it everything/ everything is alive/alive, alive. “Sea Dogs” is both the album’s thesis and a bridge to Fish Pond Fish, modifying that album’s motifs about nature as a reflection of the self to ask whether nature is not also a means of escaping or transcending the confines of selfhood altogether.
It’s a rare thing and becoming rarer by the day: a group of musicians with that emulsifying magic to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. And to see Darlingside perform live is to confirm this special chemistry. With the release of Everything Is Alive the band will, for the first time, take to the road without Dave Senft. Instead of filling his spot directly, the band has wisely chosen to honor the special chemistry of the foursome by letting those arrangements live on the recordings without obligation to faithfully recreate them onstage. While Dave remains a contributing member of the band, on tour Darlingside will perform in a completely different configuration altogether—a configuration that will, at times, include the album’s drummer Ben Burns, singer Molly Parden, and others—proving again how the group can adroitly rearrange themselves for the breaking of a new and different day.
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