“Never smother the mystical song that rests deep inside you,” Erin Birgy murmurs midway through Dolphine, her fifth record as Mega Bog. Since adopting the moniker 10 years ago, the Los Angeles-based musician has lived out this sagely maxim. Her music overflows with images of hidden scorpions, blue salamanders, writhing snakes, and a flesh-eating troll. Despite its inscrutability, Dolphine feels genuine—the heartfelt expression of a uniquely weird viewpoint.
The album is partially inspired by the otherworldly writings of the late Ursula K. Le Guin, who once said of the label “science fiction”: “My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.” Dolphine similarly flits from groovy jazz to psych-pop to sylvan folk with freaky glee. Birgy’s idiosyncrasies bear resemblance to the off-kilter lyricism of Cate Le Bon or Aldous Harding, the elastic voice of Jessica Pratt, or the cosmic guitar reverence of Big Thief, whose drummer James Krivchenia, a frequent Mega Bog collaborator, engineered the album. But Dolphine pushes further into uncharted realms, where any rules about conventional melodies and lyrical coherence deteriorate.
Opener “For the Old World” wobbles on a slack tightrope, always threatening to tumble into chaos. The song springs between twinkling percussion, smooth jazz, and prickly tension; a woodwind zigzags erratically in the background like a shrill songbird. Melodic shapes undulate to a hidden logic on “Fwee Again,” an instrumental odyssey that references a made-up word for joyful epiphanies from 2017’s Happy Together. Birgy is once again backed on these adventures by a crew of collaborators—among them Krivchenia (percussion, effects), Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy (guitar), and iji’s Zach Burba (synth, bass)—whose performances enrich her remarkably peculiar stories.
Yet Birgy is not a storyteller in the traditional, linear sense. Rather, she strings crisp and enigmatic fragments into enchanting collages. “Crazy Kermin in the hall/Shadow plant leaf bleats/Piano stumbling/I forgot all your songs,” goes “I Hear You Listening (To the Bug on My Wall).” “As foxes bloat up Eastern expressway shoulders/Aloe breaks an arm,” she burbles on “Untitled (With ‘C’).” Much like a Le Guin novel, these sentences throw you into fully formed worlds without a map. But immersion encourages acclimation. Birgy explains the process plainly on “Shadows Break”: “The language erodes and unearths me more.”
Exploring this new world reveals abstract expressions of pain and loss, both specific and existential. “And now I’m crying like a spider in the sun/It’s not fear, or sadness, or even aches/It’s just living/Long, long, long,” she aches on the curliquing “Left Door.” “Untitled (With ‘C’)” was written for Philando Castile, the Minnesota man killed by a cop during a traffic stop. “Another murder should still disturb you/Delivered like clubhouse music to a white supremacy/Loneliness like this one cannot last,” Birgy sings over mournful bass in a rare unambiguous moment. Midway through the record is “Spit in the Eye of the Fire King,” a duet written by and performed with Ash Rickli, a Georgia musician who later passed away suddenly. Though the song’s cheery folksiness is an outlier, its presence underlines Birgy’s appreciation of the mystical implications of life beyond death.
The personal significance of these losses can sometimes be so heavily cloaked as to feel impenetrable. Yet there’s something refreshing about Birgy’s unapologetic commitment to her inner code. This is her reality, and sometimes it can be stranger—and certainly more poetic—than fiction. “Diary of a Rose” plays with a double meaning of the word “rose,” referencing both the shrub and the name of Birgy’s childhood horse to tie together images of flower-induced mania and the animal lounging in grass. The gentle “Truth in the Wild” may or may not be a love song, but it concludes with a clear and profound declaration of desire: “I want to be with the one I love/I want to play with the one I love.”
It’s tempting to use the word “surreal” to describe the visionary world Birgy conjures. Her songs teem with colorful metaphors, recurring characters, and dreamlike arrangements, like a Leonora Carrington painting set to music. But often “surreal” is confused with fantasy or hallucination, illogical outpourings of the subconscious thrown together for eccentric value. Even at its most inexplicable, there’s not a moment on Dolphine that feels careless. As her imagination roams, Birgy understands that sometimes irrationality is necessary to make sense of reality.
Buy: Rough Trade
