The Ophelias

Three years on from 2018’s critically lauded ‘Almost’, Cincinnati, Ohio’s indie-rock foursome The Ophelias return with ‘Crocus’. An Autumnal album full of hymnal anthems, a seasonal, synaesthesiaesthetic sound that captures the palpable drops in temperatures, the visible spaces in between trees empty of foliage, the chills that spill up (and down) the spinal c(h)ord, charting the gradual shift from bloom to gloom (and vice versa), steadying the pulse of circadian rhythm and liminal blues.

Back in 2018 the group (vocalist/guitarist Spencer Peppet; drummer Mic Adams and violinist Andrea Gutmann Fuentes now joined by new bassist/longtime music video collaborator Jo Shaffer) were all yet to graduate from college, their singular sense of community forged through a shared experience of the rites of passage.

On ‘Crocus’ the group’s discrete, distinct and disparate influences inform, permeate and proliferate. Dramatically and thematically trapped between blurred memories, good, bad, forgettable, regrettable, unutterable - wrapped in twilight transitions, (funda)mental metamorphoses, intimate dreams and candid realities.

Vocalist Peppet speak-sings and talk-walks in the vein of Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, a warm burr, a becalmed, authoritative form of pose-prose narrativising. Throughout it’s a case of crystalline story-telling, crisp scenario-spelling, clean diction-fiction, as a matter-of-faction, supplemented by sparkling, sparse and subtle (strings/horns/winds) orchestration: in particular Gutmann Fuentes’s sultra-violins which when also combined with several friends’ contributions (Julien Baker provides harmonious-support on ‘Neil Young on High’) provides an almost Mark Twain-esque olde tyme Americana feel to proceedings. These ‘timeless’ properties and future-echoes/past-visions results in an album potentially mistaken for a long-lost treasure-trove find from the early 1990s.

The album was recorded in a Masonic lodge in Kentucky, a site the band are ‘2000%’ convinced is haunted, a belief that adds to an eth-eerie-al esoteric sheen of vanquished vectors and languished spectres.