Of all the restorative trends that stuck in 2024, perhaps the most underrated was junk journaling. More freeform than scrapbooking and less goal-oriented than collaging, it’s the art of repurposing your everyday consumption—to-go bags, stickers, receipts—into a low-stakes visual diary. TikTok is flooded with inspo spreads and invites to local meetups, as crafters learn to repurpose the debris and imperfections in their own lives. That attitude is the heart of DIY, and Olympia folk-punk band Pigeon Pit have known its benefits for over a decade, back when frontwoman Lomes Oleander started it as a solo project. Sorting through the mess of life is a nonstop task. On their fifth album, crazy arms, Pigeon Pit posit that learning how to create art and community within that churn is the only way to keep from suffocating under the accumulation.
Oleander is upfront about where she stands these days: in a post-optimism, post-disillusionment, post-knocked-down-get-back-up mental state where she’s a mess and so are her friends—but hey, they’re still here. Together, the members of Pigeon Pit funnel their emotions into an album that exhales vulnerability through acoustic guitar, fiddle, and banjo. crazy arms sounds like a honky-tonk held in the creaky living room of a local punk house, but more raw and ragged due to the voice at its center. Oleander sings with the panic of Bright Eyes (“Bad Advice”), the romanticism of Radiator Hospital (“Apple”), and the jitters of Violent Femmes (“Keys to the City”) so the instruments swirl around her urgent sincerity like Cassadaga performed on If You Make It’s iconic pink couch. Pigeon Pit are thoroughly folk-punk, but the twang of their country influence is a pleasant surprise, like using fabric softener on a faded back patch.
As Pigeon Pit work through the weight, stress, and grief of daily living on crazy arms, they capture unexpected sparks of joie de vivre. Whether covering Japanther or flipping Semisonic lyrics, Pigeon Pit offer bittersweet snapshots that stick with you long afterwards: the button on someone else’s Levi’s jeans stamping Oleander’s flesh, hearing a dead friend’s band on the radio, singing “Happy birthday, birthright enemy!” to her body. Oleander’s emotional gutchecks feel honest whether they’re elated or anguished thanks to her casually poetic view of surrounding objects: the keys to the city that are just a pair of bolt cutters; the sirens approaching an apartment in flames that cry “like they knew what that meant.”
Yet for all that affecting prose, Oleander also knows the power that music itself can convey. The rambling rhythm section of “Stone Song” turns her dejection into hope, and “Run Your Pockets” finds belonging in roving piano. On “Maddy’s Song,” she yields the reins to bandmate Maddy Bun, whose stripped-back love song lets banjo do most of the confessing and then strikes when the heart is tender, singing, “As if love could ever be contained within a word.” Amid all the tumult, the song’s simplicity grounds crazy arms.
The band embedded that authentic perspective in the album’s creation, too. Recorded straight to tape on a 4-track in their friend’s basement, crazy arms consists almost entirely of live takes punctuated by the occasional warble of tape degradation. One of the lone dubs was a physical effort: After pushing a piano off a van and towards the house studio, the members learned it couldn’t fit through the basement door. Their improvised fix—running microphones out to the piano to track parts, while Oleander engineered with headphones in the empty studio down below—treated restrictions as an opportunity for creativity and teamwork. As Oleander puts it on “Bronco,” there’s only one real guarantee: “All that’s left, my friends, that love you chose: to ride your highs and lows.”
Whether Oleander sings about her own life or recounts the stories of others, the shortcomings and obstructions that populate the world of crazy arms are all the same. “Josephine County Blues” casts a landscape where loved ones gaze distantly from missing person fliers, residents 3D-print guns and sell dimebags to get by, and propping a chair under the trailer door is a bedtime routine. “I guess some buried treasure just ain’t meant to be found,” Oleander sings before a sanguine solo on pedal steel. In anyone else’s version of the song, this would be a tragedy. For Pigeon Pit, it’s a victory, another day where you kept yourself alive.
