The defeatist in all of us has a booming voice. It's tough to drown out when it's being piped into such a confined space. It's there to remind us of the odds and how poor they are for most of us about most anything, but the most remarkable successes can be the small, humble ones. They can be getting the right golden light to fall on our tired face in a photograph. They can be a delicate touch that's full of unmistakable love. It can be an exhausting/thrilling conversation that rambles through the wee hours of the night meant for the living dead and hungry owls.
Melaena Cadiz chronicles the plights of the searchers, of the reachers and of all those helplessly apart people operating so deep below heaven. She writes and sings about presence and absence, as they weigh on one another. She deals with the wooden hearts and limbs that we sometimes build into our bodies so that the reverberations of the pains that hit us like birds smacking dead into clear windows that they can't see can't ripple through all of our muscles. The landscapes that she drafts up in these four gorgeous songs are about winning and losing, usually a little of both, which feels natural. She can make you feel as if your body were full of vast skies and murky blood, as if there was no fault in feeling shaky, or being nervous about what may come after nightfall. It might eat you alive, but that's just the defeatist talking. More often than night, you'll just enjoy the company and have someone to dine with.