Yolk in the Fur | Wild Pink
The imagistic sophomore release of the New York trio is heartfelt and soaring.
Yolk in the Fur
“you lose something sweet but you become more real.”
The opening instrumental in the first seconds of “Burger Hill” is warm and open-armed. The welcoming melody feels maternal, swaddling us and leading us toward something special and close to our own story.
The singer may be standing on the top of Burger Hill the chorus but a hot air balloon waxes toward us from the horizon. As the song unravels, he stretches toward the basket and climbs over the wicker railing, steadying himself and gently sailing out over the valley beneath him. The pastoral imagery glides beneath. As small details merge into large blocks of color and pattern, a funny thing happens: our separation and altitude doesn’t make us feel distant from the land beneath our balloon — the scope has changed but we feel more intertwined and pressed into the shared landscape.
Heights affects the vocabulary we use to describe things - adjusted perspective calls with clarity the significance of things. John Ross’ voice begins to drop words and images to the barely visible faces and hands and ears in the grass gazing up towards his wicker carriage. Crafting messages to send below to our hands from the floating balloon, the knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss the severity of his newly penned compassion. Gratefully, Wild Pink avoids the mistake of writing us a meaningful letter with the caps-lock on. Restraint is his strongest tool as he leverages overworn topics of life, death, and love. It’s difficult to carry grandeur down from the mountain in your own two hands, and the sweetness in Yolk in the Fur is the kind that only emerges from unjaded grief.
With songs heavily carried by open, passionate, nearly self-effacing constant strumming and full chords, Yolk in the Fur has the strange and delightful ability to surprise. “There is a ledger” arrests your attention when his stream-of-consciousness honesty: “I’m just trying not to take it so bad”, reveals an unforeseen depth of sweetness as new melodies dance into vision along with his words. It is in bringing to light (perhaps to his own view) the most relatable shortcomings that he marries the difficult pair of idealism and vulnerability : “each day I struggle with myself.”
Instrumental breaks aren’t fills. They gently hold your eye contact and lead you somewhere. Makes me lean in a little closer and listen more slowly; makes me smile in my gut when the triplets on the snare push the guitar to a harder solo on “Lake Eerie”.
Even with easily dismissable catharsis, emotion filled turns and bridges carry a sincerity that would sound cheap if delivered by a voice less hushed.
As old images fall into our mind and remnants of old conversations linger, he points out artifacts, holding them to the light, and allows memory to be a participant at the table. The act of remembering and its direct influence on learning and navigating is what guides him to a vision of wholeness. Sidestepping pedantic high-ground, he elevates us.
Yolk in the Fur by Wild Pink, Cover.
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