A single guitar thrums doggedly forward, supporting with all its might the quavering, world-weary alto of Justin Morris. “Walking her dog as the sun goes down,” he intones on “Beadie,” in the voice of a man who doesn’t want to walk the stupid thing but can’t conceptualize doing anything else—doing anything, for that matter—before murmuring, “I got back on the SSRI.” Joined by a bed of supporting strings and vocal overlays, Morris sounds no less alone as the song blooms into its loud, jagged climax. But by the tune’s last seconds, only the sole guitar thrum remains. Thus begins Companion, North Carolina band Sluice’s third album.
If you’re already feeling chest pains, stop here, because Companion only gets more achingly sincere the further it crawls along. The 10-song record, conceptualized in Sylvan Esso’s studio Betty’s two winters ago, attempts to move past a Bushwick robbery that led Morris back to songwriting in 2019 while reckoning with the unfathomable prospect of finding purpose in a hollowed-out America. For all our well-earned cynicism, the scraggly remnants of our long-suffering dream rarely disappear entirely, kept alive by our desperate need to have faith in anything at all. Companion carries that familiar weight well, churning it into an atmospheric exactitude that places you directly in the barren hinterlands Morris himself traverses. He guides listeners through wooded valleys and cookie-cutter suburbs, undergirded by an overlapping, intentional arrangement of acoustic and electric strings provided by Oliver Child-Lanning’s bass and Libby Rodenbough’s fiddle. A steady drumbeat, carried forth with an expert hand by Avery Sullivan, propels the record forward.
A woman’s baleful shouts catalyze “WTF,” a moody, electric-guitar track that turns anthemic as uncertainty envelops Morris. “Everything’s so hard to do,” he tells the void, slipping into a reedy head voice. “Should I go back to school?” Amidst clashing guitars, he decides, “I’ll find a new thing to do.” Whether the listener ought to believe him is up for debate; I don’t know that I do. Then there’s “Zillow,” likely the preeminent song ever written about real-estate listings, where Morris asks, in a quavering voice soft as a drumbeat heralding the death of an affordable America: “This pool house cost $500,000. Where will you live?” On the album’s soaring centerpiece, “Unknowing,” a prayer by a Trappist monk is transfigured into a nine-minute meditation on the struggle to hold faith. There’s some of Jason Molina’s style lingering in Morris’ steady, pleading invocations. “I think about being very wrong, about needing to be the animal chasing, when you can be the sleeping dog on the vinyl boat cushion,” he moans in the album’s emotional zenith.
It is, in fact, that kind of clinically-precise verbiage that makes Companion stand out. Morris does a remarkably no-nonsense job of pinpointing the thousand tiny hurts of modern American life, even when he’s singing about dancing to Kenny Chesney in the kitchen. Lines like “I could break my back lifting this beam or sending this email” and “here’s a marshmallow and a hot dog” feel weighty in their silliness, poignantly mundane, and numbingly depressing in the way of so much of quotidian life. In “Vegas,” verses coast through signifiers of modern living: Miley Cyrus, Craigslist, shoddy public transit, the crushing hole where God’s supposed to be, and a Moby Dick reference.
Throughout the record, the illusion of the American Dream is treated as exactly that: an illusion, and one that we must admit will never be realized if we hope to find our way in life. Morris’ terse alto does a scary good job of intoning the nihilism of a country stripped of its core, reduced to an empty, rotted-out vacuum of empty promises stretching out into infinity. But even then, Companion refuses to give up. These songs push staunchly forward, looking for something to believe in. The identity of the titular “companion” remains obfuscated. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter either way. Or, perhaps, the album itself is our compatriot. The listener may not find whatever they’re looking for, but at least they’re not searching alone. [Mtn Laurel Recording Co.]
Miranda Wollen is a staff writer at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her @mirandakwollen or email her.
