Fairweather Currents is the bedroom pop project of Dylan Citron who hails from New York. We briefly covered his previous album Truesdale and liked it a lot, so I was pretty happy when Citron got in touch to say he had made another record. It’s called Things Get Better and builds on everything Truesdale did so well, mostly soft and sad and gentle, a melting pot of superior influences – such as the direct emotional earnestness of Small Wonder, Nana Grizol-style songwriting and the cosy intimate atmosphere of the bedroom singer-songwriter acts we like so much here at Wake the Deaf (e.g. Free Cake For Every Creature, Long Neck, Kissing Fractures).
‘Take Me Out of New York’ begins as the album means to go on, somehow defiantly gentle, like a quiet little voice that tells you to keep on going, “There is a light at the ending of the tunnel that gets brighter every day / As dim as it can ever get, it can never be erased”. This trend continues with ‘Folktale Amongst Sea Monsters’ and ‘Neptune’, vocals sometimes hushed to an near-whisper and sometimes rising with a reticent stoicism (“I just want to write songs that are beautiful and warm / like hot cocoa and a fire in a blizzard”). ‘I’m Slowly Forgetting All My Old Songs’ ripples with piano and is reminiscent of Windmill.
‘Drifting in Space’ is probably my favourite track on the album (at least at the time of writing), mentioning a whole host of things including dreams of alien abductions and sunburn from stars and depression and Alex G and Hop Along and beards and the end of the world. It’s incredibly pretty and more importantly feels honest and heartfelt.
“All of my songs they are the same
I love my mothers maiden name
it reminds me of the summer air and the desert”
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‘Jim’ is addressed to a dead friend, with lines such as “I know you have your doubts about heaven or a god / I do too but from the things I’ve heard you’ll find it pretty nice there /
send a postcard”. It’s actually pretty heavy stuff, with crying parents and bittersweet memories and that numb no-feeling that can follow bad news. But it’s also, like the album as a whole, shot through with hope, little glimmers of that grow in intensity and break through in beams at the end: “I think that I’ve been growing for awhile now / I think that I will miss you for awhile now / I think that I’ve be living for awhile now / I think that I’ll be living for awhile more”. ‘I’m Too Quiet to Play House Shows’ is a pretty acoustic instrumental, while ‘I Used to Be a Bird’ has strong shades of Bright Eyes, with simple acoustics and pensive vocals about past lives in wide open natural spaces.
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‘The Island Pt. 2’ stretches to almost ten minutes, a piano-based epic with hints of the heart-on-sleeve nature of Wendy, and then closer ‘Take New York Out of Me’ returns to acoustic guitar, providing the mirrored book-end of the opening track an some nicely reassuring lyrics, “Things get worse but they’ll get better soon”.
If you like any of the aforementioned acts then I urge you to check out Things Get Better. It’s not in any way flashy or pretentious and retains an endearing sense of understated honesty throughout, which is pretty much the most important thing from this kind of music.
You can get Things Get Better on a name-your-price basis from the Fairweather Currents Bandcamp page.