[Photo by: Peter Ash Lee]
Michelle Zauner knows a thing or two about grief. After a few years in Philly indie-emo band Little Big League, the Seoul, South Korea-born Zauner moved back to her hometown of Eugene, Oregon, to care for her mother, then diagnosed with stage 4 gastrointestinal cancer. She died six months later.
In the wake of that unimaginable agony, Zauner wrote her first two albums as a soloist under the name
Psychopomp, a gorgeous, shimmering rumination on loss, and in 2017,
Soft Sounds From Another Planet, loosely inspired by an obsession with the Mars One project (a privately owned operation with the goal of establishing a human colony on Mars). Of course, her planetary ambition was more of a metaphor disassociating from her matriarchal trauma to preserve her sanity, looking beyond Earth to establish the most distance between herself and her pain.
Fog Lake Announces New Album Tragedy Reel
Listen to lead single Jitterbug now
Captain, but has kept relatively quiet since then. He s making his grand return with
Tragedy Reel, set for release on April 23 via Orchid Tapes.
Powell made the album this past summer, after returning to his hometown, Gloverton, NL, for three months. Collaborators include Orchid Tapes label head Warren Hildebrand of Foxes in Fiction, who contributed synths and backing vocals, and Molly Germer (Alex G, Whitney, Tomberlin), who provided strings.
Powell contextualizes his hometown stay with newly released lead single Jitterbug, where he sings in a breathy falsetto about how his changing ambitions have impacted the way he views his old haunts, accompanied by a double-barrel of plaintive pianos and whirling synths.