Reviews of Upward, Broken, Always [12k2042]

The beauty of this production is simply overwhelming, not least because in between it is always so wonderfully tugging, pushing and squeaking.

The five original songs, stretched out in time, are beautiful, both warm and complex, covered with enveloping saturations and some pearl notes, light feedback and hesitant sounds.

Can a person come home, if home has changed? Or is the experience more like stepping into a river? Deupree and Fuller suggest that the home need not be defined by geography.

“Upward, Broken, Always” is easily in the list for the best albums of the year. It delivers on what you would expect and then some. It highlights how time and attention to an album can result in such as resounding success.

The overdriven electric guitar maintains a gritty sound even as a lighter melody rides shotgun beside it. Sometimes it opens its jaws, unleashing roars of remembrance in gushing waves of distortion, looking upon a state through opaque, half-remembered details and truth-bending inaccuracies.

Here there is something quite eluding to Americana, and/or folk music. But beyond the beautiful twang, site a world dappled with birdcalls, and a blissful harmony, including a haunting croon.

There is a special aura to this record, the kind of which is ultimately hard to put into words, but which can be keenly felt in the listening – an emotional honesty and authenticity that seeps into and becomes inseparable from the music.