Ohtis – Curve Of Earth
Full Time Hobby – Out Now
The heavy-duty song writing artisans of the 20th century applied ambition and vision to their craft, seeing it as an art form without boundaries in terms of subject matter and range. It’s fairly difficult to think of a song topic that is out of bounds today (and anything that is a no-go I really don’t want to think about at all thank you), which means it’s always fair game for an artist to use music creatively as a vessel for dealing with dark times on a personal level too. When music heads down this path though, I have trouble engaging with it when it takes a black canvas and applies thick unsubtle splashes of depressing darkness and monotone despair all over the presentation. I still want some hopefulness I can grab hold of; I still want to see some shards of light challenging the overwhelming blackness. And above all, I still crave a bit of musicality. Even if the overall tone leans towards minor, mournful chord progressions; a moment of light and colour, a brief major change or melodic rise can give a piece just enough air to breathe and inspire you to meditate on whatever deeper message is being purveyed.
‘Pervert Blood’, the opening track on this Ohtis album, dives straight into the dark stuff. In the first verse alone, the protagonist is internally wrestling with how he would have murdered a bag of puppies that his grandpa threw into a burning can. The singer then announces, in the name of honesty, that he’s forsaken anyone who ever gave a damn about him. If you read these lyrics without a clue as to the music they were written with, you’d be forgiven for expecting a dreary, sub-gothic dirge or deep-doom vocals that sound like they’re ready to throw up in a bucket. This is not what we have at all. This is gentle Americana, gorgeous lolling open-air acoustics and a weary yet optimistic voice licking its way around dreamy melodies. Then a pedal steel enters the picture and the song drifts up into the clouds. Add to this occasional self-mocking winks to the listener that briefly disarm you (“give me back a light, make it bright enough to give me a lobotomy”) before settling on the conclusion that this narrator has been saying he’s mentally ill for so long that it’s become his reality. Well, I don’t know about you, but those immediate contrasting shades of darkness and light, descension and elevation and downright severity mixed with dry wit are more than enough to hook me as a curious listener. This is a record with depth, but if you prefer you could just whistle along with it as well.
‘Curve Of Earth’ is an album that stares down some of life’s darkest back holes. It does so out of personal experience and so it resonates with a survivor’s instinct. There’s an audible motivation to never lose sight of all that is beautiful and worth living for in these tracks, which is where the hope comes into the equation. All of these tunes are uplifting in tone; ‘Runnin’ has a campfire sing-along chorus and ‘Little Sister’ is decorated with the kind of string quartet backdrop that George Martin would have proudly put his name to.
I also enjoy how Swinson tends to sidestep pitfalls that could see these topics descend into naval gazing self-pity. A song dealing with ‘Rehab’ could so easily disappear down a rabbit hole screaming that the process is so hard to get through. Instead, we have the rather brilliant line recalling while wandering the earth how he “slept under a bridge, but that makes it sound a lot worse than it was.” He goes on to explain it’s because “when I woke up, I was alive and in the night someone we loved had gotten drunk and died”. It’s a deceptively bouncy song too, bartering with god to get onside and almost daring us listeners to rage against the demons with him. And at the centre of it all is the voice of Sam Swinson, whose real-life story involves a battle with life-threatening addiction on top of internal religious trauma; a legacy of his being brought up in a fundamentalist, evangelical cult. By channelling the cards life has dealt into his art, Ohtis make music with authentic grit, a vintage rural spirit and a core belief that all can be good and lush with life once more.
As a creative unit, Ohtis became the performing name for the music Sam made with Adam Pressley after they’d connected in Illinois high school. As teenagers, they self-released CD-Rs locally and played live with an ever-evolving collective of musicians one of whom, multi-instrumentalist Nate Hahn, became another full-time band member. Sadly, around ten years ago, Sam Swinson was fighting what, at some stages, looked like a losing battle with his addictions. His relationship with two fellow Ohtis bandmates, Pressley and Hahn, was by now so stretched and damaged that the band eventually ceased to exist. Despite living in separate parts of the country though, they remained in touch and did continue to exchange long-distance song ideas. Happily, Sam Swinson eventually beat his heroin addiction and as part of his steps to recovery (the ninth step to be precise), he repaired relationships with those two key Ohtis colleagues. Finally, in 2019, the band are fully back to life having collected and recorded the material resulting from this troubled period. The result is an amazing album of emotional depth, scolding honesty amidst self-reflection but above all, a sharp focus on the basic truth that where there’s life there’s hope. In compiling the composition works that document the difficult years Sam has lived through, the song collection ‘Curve Of Earth’ scoops up buckets of hope as it sails doggedly through these real-life troubled waters.
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