(2016) Erin Tobey - Middlemaze
Review:
“Fear is easy, everything else is hard,” Erin Tobey sings steadily on the second track of her new album Middlemaze after having harped on her youth and fearlessness on the song prior. Actually older than she lets on in the opener I’m Young, the Bloomington artist can tell us that fear doesn’t always leave. It’s something to fight back against for the rest of your life, but it’s worth it for everything else, and Tobey has done a lot of everything else.
In the decade since her stunning solo debut, which combined intimate lyricism and roomy electric guitar arrangements, Tobey has played and toured in Bloomington acts like Mt. Gigantic and the scuzzy lo-fi duo Brenda’s Friend. She’s also gotten married and settled down, and she’s worked on her second solo album with her husband Jeff Grant and brother Matt Tobey. But Middlemaze is a reflection on the confusion that remains even in settling down—how when you get past the beginning some things settle but the muddle of living doesn’t always lessen in the ways you might expect it to when you’re younger.
Tobey’s weapon is metaphor. With pictures from the rural outdoors and from mall security cameras, she makes the maze more endurable. “Loneliness like a kernel in your sneaker / pry it out,” she sings on “Lonely Daughter”, her voice supple and calm, and suddenly loneliness is something tangible to dispose of. Meanwhile love is a lever with which to set someone free, and constant contact is a vice. Middlemaze has the vastness you could expect from someone who’s gathered experience in many worlds, including the worlds of punk and folk in near equal measure. Some of these songs have the energized country tinge of Jenny Lewis’ songwriting, while others fall into line with Sibylle Baier’s smooth, wrenching folk songs. And there are didactic moments that Tobey wouldn’t have allowed herself ten years ago. Floating over the infectious sway of an organ on Work It Out, she runs over the rubric of compromise: “Work it out if we have to talk all night / say what’s wrong but make sure to say what is right.” But even these instructions feel more like a reminder to the self than advice from a wise parental figure—there are things she’s learned, but it doesn’t mean they don’t bear repeating in private every so often. There are some creeping uncertainties that only widen after youth, triggered by the inevitability of death and the failing of relationships. Still, sometimes you have to make peace with the maze, take solace in just being there. So she sings on the penultimate song, “Death to death and death to life / I’m here with you tonight.” We can walk through the thick of things with a comfort that’s lasting, at least for a little while.
Tracklist:
01. I'm Young.flac
02. Medicine Garden.flac
03. Leaf Pile.flac
04. All Over The World.flac
05. Lonely Daughter.flac
06. Work It Out.flac
07. Flotsam In The Wake.flac
08. Baby Monitor.flac
09. Swallow The Pill.flac
10. Infinity Song.flac
Summary:
Country: USA
Genre: Indie-Folk
Media Report:
Source : CD
Format : FLAC
Format/Info : Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : ~590-956 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
