Folk Bitch Trio – Now Would Be A Good Time (CD)

Folk music has a bad habit of being presented as a deathly serious concern. Its something you cry to, its overly sacred, its solemnly considered by critic-historians. ButFolk Bitch Trio, former high school friendsHeide Peverelle(they/them),Jeanie Pilkington(she/her) andGracie Sinclair(she/her), have a shared sense of humour that is embedded deep in their music, and that sets it alight, safe from the self-serious traps of the genre.

Now Would Be A Good Time, their debut album, tells vivid, visceral stories, and is funny and darkly ironic in the manner of writers like Mary Gaitskill or Otessa Moshfegh. Their music sounds familiar, but the songs are modern, youthful, singing acutely through dissociative daydreams and galling breakups, sexual fantasies and media overload, all the petty resentments and minor humiliations of being in your early twenties in the 2020s.

Cathode Ray opens with caution, its first harmonies arriving in big, looping sighs. Its vulnerable but a little menacing, with a wide-open chorus and a spacious, airy beat anchoring everything. Moth Song, a song about unrequited love and being so spun out by everything that you feel like youre delusional and hallucinating crazy things, forms the albums spare centrepiece,Anita Clarks undulating violin part drifting in and out of focus as if from a dream.

Other songs arent as oblique, instead chronicling brutally familiar moments at the end of relationships: The tense, emotionally volatile torch song The Actor, says Peverelle, is about going to your partners one-woman show and then getting broken up with. Hotel TV, a hypnotic, late-night reverie, is about having a sex dream about somebody else while next to your partner, and your partner being a liar, explainsPilkington.

The strongest link between the trio, aside from friendship, is music. We all talked about loving music when we were growing up, and knowing we wanted music to be a big part of our lives, saysPilkington. That feelingof music as an innate calling, as opposed to hobby or follywas justified:Folk Bitch Triohave already toured across Australia, Europe and the US, supporting bands as disparate asKing Gizzard,Alex GandJulia Jacklin. Theyve signed withJagjaguwar, a home for singular icons and iconoclasts (Bon Iver, Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten, UMOand others), and theyve found their first diehard fans with dazzling harmonies and acerbic lyricism that transcend genre expectations and audience lines.

These are the stakes: Learning how to live a life free of lovesickness and loser exes, when to sink into contemporary nihilism and when to have a laugh with your friends, and why being alive can feel so ephemeral and unreal. In this sense,Now Would Be A Good Timefeels like a manual for modern living: a missive from three proud Folk Bitches finding beauty and wisdom where they can, together.

TRACKLISTING:01. God’s a Different Sword02. Hotel TV03. The Actor04. Moth Song05. Ill Find A Way06. Cathode Ray07. Foreign Bird08. Thats All She Wrote09. Sarah10. Marys Playing the Harp