Swans Today by Paulie Swan

For fans of Geese, Champion Trees, Fargo, vocal jazz, and the stunned silence of a late night walk right after the end of something beautiful, Swans Today by Paulie Swan snapshots the denial and anger stages of grief through an elegant singer-songwriter style. Jangly guitar leads, classic pop piano, and minimal harmonic synths all point us to the main attraction in a deep baritone half-spoken vocal, standing out from the instrumental background enough to elevate the lyrics while retaining that essential spark of old-school balladry. With all our attention on the lyrics, we immediately notice prevailing themes of self-deprication, with Swan constantly making extremely meta references to their distaste for their own voice. Within the compact structure of an EP, we move from this extremely internalized negativity to its broader impacts in the forms of fizzled relationships and missed opportunities. We’re constantly meant to wonder whether these doubts caused the failures or if the failures caused the doubt, the record forming a melancholic circle which drops us off right where we began.