Abby Posner – Kisbee Ring
Self Released – 12 November 2021
A longtime presence on the LA circuit, Abby Posner is a singer-songwriter with an apparent affection for the music of 70s Laurel Canyon. The album’s title is a vernacular term for a lifebelt, a metaphor that underpins much of the material. It provides the entry point, clattering drum pattern, piano and strummed guitar backgrounding an end of a relationship lyric about how life seems “one bad joke”, throwing out the life preserver to a relationship metaphorically drifting out to sea.
Traced with nimble fingerpicked guitar, Low, Low Low, is again about being adrift and out of mental sorts (“I don’t feel right today/Something in my head’s got me gone I don’t want to get high anyway/Been living in the clouds for too long/When life as we know is on hold”), wanting to hide away but getting to know and understand the sadness you feel.
The catchy soft brushed drum shuffle and layered doo wop-ish backing vocals of Emergency Use Only, link again to that core image: “Thrown out to the deepest sea/Now I cannot find the shore”. Singing of life bringing you down and people projecting their experiences back on you, she offers herself up to help enable recovery, “You project the story/And I’ll be the screen/Don’t let it slip on by/It doesn’t matter what you know/ It’s about how hard you try…take it all out on me”.
Featuring resonator guitar, banjo and dappled clopping percussion, Mary Scholz adding her vocals, Joshua Tree offers a different metaphor for loss and the fragile nature of love (“Cactus standing like a ghost on a tombstone/Crooked as a wing/Whispers howl from the walls of this old home/ Listen to them sing/Where do you go when you lose yourself and the road is all you see”). Fingerpicked mandolin shimmers through The Trilogy, which speaks of choosing to withdraw from life and “be a prisoner of your thoughts” or to fight the depression, “take the next train out …and let go of the doubts”, and make it to the other shore.
The melodically circling Fall Apart continues the theme of a turbulent relationship (“Are you weary of early mornings/Fits and furies without a warning/Losing sleep endlessly/There’s no place to run…Are we moving or slowly fading”). Still, not one, it seems, she’s ready to quit (“You’ve never known a love like this/ It will hook your heart/You will fall apart/In the best way…Now you can’t get enough/When the den has cleared/You will dread the silence”).
The album’s most powerful moment comes with the mandolin-accompanied Blind Spot, a pointed commentary on the state of the nation (“The madness outside is keeping me awake”), white privilege (“If the sirens are calling I don’t fear for my rights/I can run in the streets at night/While a black man loses his life”) and complicity by silence (“We become the problem when we keep our mouths shut”), asking “Who are we to say/That everything has changed/When we follow the rivers of bigotry and hate/The message that we get/There’s us and then them”.
Featuring Ross Newhouse on vocals and M’Gilvry Allen on fiddle, Wishing Well is an easy-rolling strummed number that returns to the theme of perseverance (“Always fall off track but I plow ahead… Eleventh round will knock me down/Ten minutes more could turn the tide/Leave black and blue knowing that I tried”) and hope (“I try to believe there’s a bigger plan”), reflecting on someone throwing you a lifeline as you’re trying to find who you are (“There’s a quiet sense of moving on/From the younger self that never belonged/Darling won’t you save me from myself”).
A mandolin-led slow sway, Is It Wrong is an unabashed love song (“When it’s cold outside I wanna be in your arms/ If the lights go out I don’t need anything else/I wanna be the one that you want…If the earth starts to shake and the ground beneath us falls apart/Darling let me hold you and we can get lost in the dark”), the album ending with the acoustic picked folksy Digging Corners, a song about finding calm and comfort, letting someone in and “trying to find that thing I call my own/Or someone to share it with” rather than constantly “stirring up nightmares all of the monsters we made/Digging for trouble hungry for pain”. A gently beguiling album about overcoming trials and tribulations, she’s not drowning; she’s waving.