Jennifer Castle - Monarch Season (2020) [Hi-Res]

"I had forgotten, somehow, that moonlight is the reflection of sunlight. The moon is so iconic, it had become it's own celebrity to me. Sometimes individualization is like that. We are praised to become our own identity-singular shining orbs. This record is a reminder to cherish openly that which reflects off and onto me. A reminder that stone orbs only become meaningful moons when they experience the gravity and light of others." - Jennifer Castle. In autumn 2009, for the first time, monarch butterflies, known for their extensive annual North American migrations, emerged from their cocoons in outer space, onboard the International Space Station, part of a NASA experiment on the effects of microgravity on Lepidoptera. They dried their wings to fly nearer to the moon than their species had ever done before. Ten years later, in autumn 2019, Jennifer Castle sat at home in her quiet coastal kitchen in Ontario, windows open to the insects and the wind and the reflection of the moon on Lake Erie-her host of muses-and recorded nine moon-suffused songs. It was monarch season again on Earth, and Jennifer was inspired to "see the wings in everything." Now, a year later, we have Monarch Season, an album as delicate and diaphanous as it's namesake creature. Although created half a year pre-pandemic, Castle deliberately pursued a minimalist, homebound, and solitary process that represented, for her musical practice, a radical reduction of scale, coupled with a telescopic expansion of scope. "I was happy," she reflects, "to write this simple suite on these big complexities." The follow-up to her acclaimed 2018 record Angels of Death, Monarch Season is Castle's private experiment on the effects of microgravity-in this context, increased immediacy, intimacy, domesticity, simplicity, brevity, and directness-on her music. As a distillation of the formal, compositional, and collaborative qualities of her previous work to the elemental-the singular body, the shared Earth, the charged silence of nature at night-Monarch Season transports the listener, from the first strains of the heavy-lidded guitar instrumental 'Theory Rest,' to that lakeside kitchen at dusk, beneath a bright moon twinned in the water. It also intentionally resembles Castle's riveting, discursive solo live performances more accurately than any other of her albums. Indeed, though it's her sixth full-length record, Monarch Season stands, in a literal sense, as her first proper 'solo' album, performed alone, entirely without human accompaniment-though a chorus of crickets provides rich interstitial support throughout. (The terrestrial vinyl and CD versions of the album include lengthier ambient segues of onsite environmental recordings between songs; you can hear the lapping of the lake.) She recorded quickly, with only her longtime co-producer Jeff McMurrich to capture her guitar, piano, and-for the first time on record-harmonica. (Jennifer dedicates her blowing to friend and mentor Kath Bloom, who played the Pink City harp.) Her airy, lambent voice renders these taut poems as elegant inscriptions within circumscription, fully present and presciently articulate, months before the age of coronavirus quarantines, about the troubles and delights to be found in aloneness, in the patient observation of our immediate surroundings, and-if you're lucky-in negotiating abiding love. It took until now for Jennifer to sing as straightforward a declaration of devotion as the final line of 'Justice': "I love you." She'd always avoided that particular idiom, preferring to swim across those selfsame waters without the easy rest on that broad rock. Such subtle nods toward classic songcraft, and traditional ideas about songcraft, abound on Monarch Season.

Review

No hyperbole, Jennifer Castle is a spectacular songwriter. Her singing carries the joy of life. --The FADER

Flickers between the broadly universal and the devastatingly personal She effortlessly conveys the conflicting emotions that accompany loss. --Pitchfork

Ethereal, deeply poetic. --Associated Press