Jennifer Castle: Monarch Season

$9.00$32.00

Jennifer Castle’s sixth full-length record stands, in a literal sense, as her first proper “solo” album, performed alone in her coastal kitchen, windows open to the insects and the wind and the reflection of the moon on Lake Erie, entirely without human accompaniment (though a chorus of crickets provides rich interstitial support throughout.)

Jennifer Castle’s sixth full-length record, the moon-suffused Monarch Season—an album as delicate and diaphanous as its namesake butterfly—stands, in a literal sense, as her first proper “solo” album, performed alone in her coastal kitchen, windows open to the insects and the wind and the reflection of the moon on Lake Erie, entirely without human accompaniment (though a chorus of crickets provides rich interstitial support throughout.)

Limited first-pressing deluxe LP edition includes a songbook of sheet music to every song, inner sleeve with lyrics, and high-res Bandcamp DL code.

Highlights

  • Limited first-pressing deluxe LP edition (1000 copies) features a songbook of sheet music to every song (not included with subsequent pressings); all editions feature 140g virgin vinyl; heavy-duty board jacket; full-color inner sleeve with lyrics; and high-res Bandcamp download code.
  • CD edition features gatefold jacket with LP replica artwork (songbook not included).
  • RIYL: The Weather Station, Itasca, Steve Gunn, Aldous Harding, Phoebe Bridgers, Joan Shelley, Cass McCombs, Meg Baird, Bill Callahan, Julie Byrne, Nadia Reid, Joanna Newsom, Angel Olsen, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Linda Perhacs, Judee Sill, Sibylle Baier, Vashti Bunyan, Kath Bloom, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young.
  • Artist page/bio/tour dates

Physical format music purchases from the PoB webstore and Bandcamp include digital downloads when feasible. Some, but not all, pre-2023 vinyl pressings also include a download coupon. For digital preorders and high-resolution digital downloads, please visit our Bandcamp page.

Tracklist

A1. “Theory Rest” 2:22
A2. “NYC” 4:00
A3. “Justice” 1:45
A4. “I’ll Never Walk Alone” 2:37
A5. “Monarch Season” 2:54
B1. “Moonbeam or Ray” 4:23
B2. “Purple Highway” 2:50
B3. “Veins” 3:39
B4. “Broken Hearted” 4:21

Catalog Number/Release Date

PoB-057 / Digital: Oct. 16, 2020 | Physical: Nov. 20, 2020

Weight N/A
FORMAT

, , ,

Album Narrative

“I had forgotten, somehow, that moonlight is the reflection of sunlight. The moon is so iconic, it had become its own celebrity to me. Sometimes individualization is like that. We are praised to become our own identity—singular shining orbs. This record is a reminder to cherish openly that which reflects off and onto me. A reminder that stone orbs only become meaningful moons when they experience the gravity and light of others.” – Jennifer Castle

In autumn 2009, for the first time, monarch butterflies, known for their extensive annual North American migrations, emerged from their cocoons in outer space, onboard the International Space Station, part of a NASA experiment on the effects of microgravity on Lepidoptera. They dried their wings to fly nearer to the moon than their species had ever done before.

Ten years later, in autumn 2019, Jennifer Castle sat at home in her quiet coastal kitchen in Ontario, windows open to the insects and the wind and the reflection of the moon on Lake Erie—her host of muses—and recorded nine moon-suffused songs. It was monarch season again on Earth, and Jennifer was inspired to “see the wings in everything.” Now, a year later, we have Monarch Season, an album as delicate and diaphanous as its namesake creature. Although created half a year pre-pandemic, Castle deliberately pursued a minimalist, homebound, and solitary process that represented, for her musical practice, a radical reduction of scale, coupled with a telescopic expansion of scope. “I was happy,” she reflects, “to write this simple suite on these big complexities.”

The follow-up to her acclaimed 2018 record Angels of Death, Monarch Season is Castle’s private experiment on the effects of microgravity—in this context, increased immediacy, intimacy, domesticity, simplicity, brevity, and directness—on her music. As a distillation of the formal, compositional, and collaborative qualities of her previous work to the elemental—the singular body, the shared Earth, the charged silence of nature at night—Monarch Season transports the listener, from the first strains of the heavy-lidded guitar instrumental “Theory Rest,” to that lakeside kitchen at dusk, beneath a bright moon twinned in the water.

It also intentionally resembles Castle’s riveting, discursive solo live performances more accurately than any other of her albums. Indeed, though it’s her sixth full-length record, Monarch Season stands, in a literal sense, as her first proper “solo” album, performed alone, entirely without human accompaniment—though a chorus of crickets provides rich interstitial support throughout. (The terrestrial vinyl and CD versions of the album include lengthier ambient segues of onsite environmental recordings between songs; you can hear the lapping of the lake.) She recorded quickly, with only her longtime co-producer Jeff McMurrich to capture her guitar, piano, and—for the first time on record—harmonica. (Jennifer dedicates her blowing to friend and mentor Kath Bloom, who played the Pink City harp.)

Her airy, lambent voice renders these taut poems as elegant inscriptions within circumscription, fully present and presciently articulate, months before the age of coronavirus quarantines, about the troubles and delights to be found in aloneness, in the patient observation of our immediate surroundings, and—if you’re lucky—in negotiating abiding love. It took until now for Jennifer to sing as straightforward a declaration of devotion as the final line of “Justice”: “I love you.” She’d always avoided that particular idiom, preferring to swim across those selfsame waters without the easy rest on that broad rock.

Such subtle nods toward classic songcraft, and traditional ideas about songcraft, abound on Monarch Season. (The inclusion of a songbook with the LP edition honors those histories with an arch wink—Castle finds it amusingly apt that her first published sheet music documents her technically “simplest” compositions.) “NYC” features a baseball anecdote and metaphor (“we all pick teams, I guess.”) “Justice” is her take on a big-tent folk-revival protest anthem. “Did you lock my heart up? And throw away the key?” Jennifer asks on “Moonbeam or Ray,” embracing the conventional romanticism of that lyrical trope. But her answer to herself is oddly put, sad and slightly schizoid: “I hope no!” “What becomes of the broken-hearted?” begins the last song, slyly conjuring Jimmy Ruffin. Castle posits no answer to that riddle.

Elsewhere, warm personal details emerge. The gorgeous spiraling melody of “Veins” (a reprise of a song she originally recorded live for her debut 2006 album as Castlemusic) laments that the world is not changing “as fast as it should”—a sentiment more relevant than ever—while also insinuating that losing love feels like being stranded on the surface of the moon. Her repeated use of the word “labour” in “I’ll Never Walk Alone”—“I birthed from the mouth of a cave”—is metaphorical and literal, on two levels. In addition to her songwriting, Castle works as a doula, but herein her creative labour bears the fruit of these new songs, or as she calls them, “my new plays.” The stage she treads might be anywhere these days, even a moonlit kitchen; the audience a room full of strangers or a field full of crickets. Home is, quite literally, where her heart resides, and where this music was born, and refined: “My home is forever my bones,” she sings. “My silk hangs on hooks/made of iron and stone.”

Jennifer describes the power of song, to her, as “the balm of love and prayers unrequited.” Perhaps the most potent prayers are the smallest ones, the private ones uttered beyond expectation or ego. Monarch Season offers these songs as lapidary mirrors of solace, radiant with reflected moonlight, to whoever is listening. Look up, look around, look inward, they say, for the light of others. And then look again.

Videos and Streaming

 

 

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgements

8/10. This homespun suite of piano, harmonica, and finger-picked acoustic guitar is dotted by natural insect and wind sounds wafting through open windows, and her reverb-soaked voice has the effect of a close-quarters conversation. The album, with its Kodachrome warmth and minimalist posture, captures a moment in time, and makes the case for listening as a revolutionary act of intimacy, where headphones and vinyl form a psychic connection between artist and fan. 

– Uncut

An inventive and subtly visceral record [of] exceedingly intimate music. On any given listen, we are invited to travel its distance along with her: to quiet our thoughts, take a deep breath, & linger in the strange, uneasy space between where we started and where we’re going next.

– Pitchfork

She’s created a folk masterpiece that slowly peels back the layers of the listener with each song. By the time the last song fades away into the colors of the clouds, the listener can feel the grass growing between their veins. It’s such a natural, unfettered vision of folk in 2020 that the record almost feels as if we’re listening across some extra-dimensional echo from the past or a ripple from a future in which the gardens of the Earth are more tended by the caretakers than they are now.

– Raven Sings the Blues

8/10. Every album that Jennifer Castle makes feels like a guidebook on how to live… you will find yourself instinctively leaning in to catch every moment… ‘The butterfly days are here,’ and there is beauty to behold.

– Exclaim!

It finds delicate shadings in the everyday and glory in glimpses of the natural world… The music is simple, but not easy, adorned with intricate picking that cascades over itself like a waterfall. The lyrics feel like really good haiku, pithy, made of small words, but evoking wonderfully precise natural images. It’s a good album for being alone somewhere calm and beautiful, not engaged with the world but not cut off either and enjoying the quiet.

– Dusted

Jennifer Castle’s musical world is one of sustained, reverberating sound. Here, pianos, guitars, and harmonicas tremble diaphanously on the air, and so does her voice, flittering somewhere between the shadows of Linda Perhacs, Josephine Foster, and Neil Young… Her tales of nature and love often end up sounding super-natural, her lyrics adding to the mix by painting intense images.

– MOJO

There is so much space left in the mix that she might consider crickets and lapping lake water to be collaborators. But despite its apparent fragility on first listen, Monarch Season contains all of the intensity that Castle refuses to shy away from …

– The FADER

[Monarch Season] conjures a very specific setting of tranquility, and “Justice” is a spectacular showcase of what the record sounds like as a whole. Castle sings gently yet confidently over crackling guitar plucks, her voice drizzled with just a touch of echo that adds subtle texture to the back of the mix. By the end, the music halts and cuts to chirping crickets, crinkling leaves, and the steady ripple of a lakeshore. It’s beautiful.

– Consequence of Sound

Amid the crickets, the waves and the moonlight, you can take solace in Monarch Season.

– CBC Music, Fall 2020 Albums You Need to Hear

The poet Carl Sandburg said the moon was a friend for the lonesome to talk to. Monarch Season, Jennifer Castle’s delicate sixth album, might be one of those conversations. This is a nursing album for the shell-shocked soul.

– The Globe and Mail

She’s the perfect artist to go to in this age of solitude. Her songs are fully attuned to herself and to nature and the seasons, a cosmic folk that aims for the moon while taking in the butterflies in front of you and the mind that contemplates them. She can’t tour the music, but you can play it live yourself: the album comes with a set of sheet music.

– Now Toronto

8/10. Castle understands that quiet can speak volumes.

– PopMatters

A-. Gentle without faltering into the insubstantial and offering sustained passages of beauty that avoid the ornate, the music’s intimacy is a strong suit.

– The Vinyl District

Like last night’s dream you can’t remember … The melody seems called up by the cadence, the instrumentation feels like a reflection of the voice, and you can find yourself listening for those tiny lifts, the suspensions in the songs replacing the songs themselves.  

Greil Marcus

No hyperbole, Jennifer Castle is a spectacular songwriter. Her singing carries the joy of life.

– The FADER

Flickers between the broadly universal and the devastatingly personal… She effortlessly conveys the conflicting emotions that accompany loss.

– Pitchfork

Ethereal, deeply poetic.

– Associated Press

Castle channels the lunar radiance of Emmylou Harris and the heartfelt barroom blues of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, quietly gleaming with a rustic beauty and a deep, patient understanding of the mystic. This record is a genuine masterpiece. 

– Aquarium Drunkard