1 week ago
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On opening track OCD, Zoh Amba stops a twinkling, rootsy guitar melody and starts over, searching for the right way to tell the story of a boy diagnosed with “dreamin’ all the time”. Amba lands on a queasy combination of empathy and conspiracy (“said that mind needs fixin’ / gunna end up like everybody”), churned up by thrashing, violent strumming – the kind that causes blisters and wrecked strings.
These cryptic postcards from Amba’s home town of Kingsport, Tennessee describe childhood memories with fresh eyes: they left at 17 and returned only recently, now in their mid-20s. Blending gruff reality with poetic licence, Eyes Full is a rugged, experimental country rock record that feels deeply lived in, despite representing an abrupt change in sound: Amba is best known as a prodigious free jazz saxophonist.
But that previous style and the new one share a similar bravery. Amba pushes their vocals like they push their sax – far past breaking point, fuelled by raw emotion. On Southern Soil, a tough sibling to the indie folk of Bright Eyes and Big Thief, Amba pleads with their family to stop keeping secrets, their voice cracking, whinnying, squeaking.
Eyes Full couples a rough-and-tumble sound with real tenderness: Weed Eating careens through the mindset of a person who has given up, the song somehow finding feral humour amid despair, while the quiet, incantatory Blueberry Thorn discovers a bloodied spirituality, its dusty fiddle as piercing as the thorns slicing its protagonist’s palms. It doesn’t matter if this guitar record might just be a detour for Amba: in the here-and-now, it’s a wild, beautiful thing.
