Sea Wolf

Get to the River Before It Runs Too Low

(Dangerbird)

Record Review by Sarah Jane

Not as history geek as Decemberists, nor as diarrhée de la bouche as The Shins, and with less him/her characteristics than Death Cab, Alex Church is poised to be the hipsterati’s next indie troubadour.

Escaping egalitarian writing disaster/New Wave band Irving, a deprogrammed Church’s Get to the River Before It Runs Too Low is his debut EP as Sea Wolf.

Church’s moniker is taken from the Jack London novel. Does his story parallel that of Sea Wolf’s young protagonist Humphrey van Weyden? Was Irving (Church is a bassist/staff writer) his Wolf Larsen?

Church’s prose paints a picture in black and white. Sung in the first-person, a matter of fact light shines on the Musicforthemorningafteresque “I Made A Resolution”. A brother murdered while a father is serving time, Church’s transient childhood sounds more like Danny Pope’s (“Running On Empty”) than that of a harpooned cabin boy. His outlaw hippy mom Christine Lahti’s Beatles and Shotgun Willie records, and the Bay Area buskers of their eventual home have left a musical impression on him for better (see below) or worse (darn those buskers.)

The “Gypsy's Tramps And Thieves”-themed “You’re A Wolf” is a great one. Displaced and unwanted, like Elliott Smith’s “St. Ides Heaven” turned inside out, Church is “Walking out between parked cars” searching for his Martha Plimpton in vain. A sentiment echoed in the crazy homeless person refrain “You’re a wolf, boy - get outta this town”. “Ses Monuments’s” 80’s mod revival meets polite 60’s pop is a promise kept from “I Made A Resolution” (“I’m never going to sing another sad song again”.) It’s a good tune that you want to jump into like one of Bert’s (“Mary Poppins”) sidewalk chalk drawings. A tambourine-shimmying-banjo-picking-“I Want To Hold Your Hand”-on-a-hayride kind of place called The Past.

Despite Dangerbird pres Jeff Castelaz’s assertions to the contrary, Sea Wolf’s folkies are comparable to Bright Eyes. Two fingers on a keyboard instrumentation and all-rhyming lyrics do not a song make (“I Don’t Know If I’ll Be Back This Time”). If you close your eyes “The Garden That You Planted” offers insight into a lonely Garfunkel without Simon “Sound Of Silence”.