Before I moved to Seattle in 2015, I fancied the Pacific Northwest a legend: a destabilizing sprawl of ocean and evergreens blanketed in purgatorial fog that seems to seep from nowhere. People, I assumed, generally went there to disappear. (“Be careful,” crowed an older coworker when he heard my plans. “It’s got one of the highest suicide rates in the country.”) Once I found myself here, I discovered it was a place like any other, with businesses and communities and an inherent dissonance in perception between those that live there and those who don’t. But now I’m tempted to define this region by its regression to the mean, inasmuch as regional identity matters at all anymore. The land never changes, but the gleaming corporate barbs embedded in its flesh have necrotized it, turned a putrescent grey amid its natural pearlescence. The ultimate goal of all that change was just change itself: money and power levied like a plastic shovel at a sandcastle, callous to the structures they raze or the lives they upend. What’s the meaning of any of it?
Air Between Us, the debut album from Seattle dream-pop trio Coral Grief, lobbies that question, both in bassist Lena Farr-Morrissey’s cryptic lyrics and in the aqueous sound that she, guitarist Sam Fason, and drummer Cam Hancock conjure. It’s a sound informed by UK bands like Stereolab, Broadcast, and Seefeel—they who hail from similar dreary shorelines and salt-kissed mists—but with pure PNW in its DNA. That’s partly because of where it was recorded: The Unknown, a small studio in rural Anacortes, helped facilitate the recording experiments of Mount Eerie, one of the area’s definitive acts.
But it’s also in how the crisp formants and steely cool of Farr-Morrissey’s voice are softened by the eulogizing they outline: the lived-in for the lifeless, a displacement of a memory. “Avenue, it’s all changed but the name,” sings Farr-Morrissey in the pensive chug of “Avenue You.” It’s not a coincidence that Air Between Us is full of sly references to Seattle’s vanished places: the title of “Mutual Wish” a play on seafood sellers Mutual Fish, unceremoniously shuttered after over 75 years; closer “Almost Everyday” a tribute to Everyday Music, the iconic record store where Farr-Morrissey once worked. “It felt like a metaphor for the city,” she professed to The Stranger. “I’m still processing it.”
It’s personal for the band, but it’s also allegorical. Isn’t every city like this now? So Air Between Us broadens its title into a double entendre, not just by examining the progressing breakdown of humanity’s connective tissue but in finding gratitude in natural beauty, something much more difficult to erase. That’s where the sound comes into play. Coral Grief, from their self-titled EP onward, had a particular strain of dream-pop on lock: subterranean streams of sound where Fason’s guitar and Farr-Morrissey’s voice merged. At first it was exemplified in sketches like “Crumble,” all heady textures and delicate emotion augmented by its home-recorded charm. Later, with the addition of a real drummer, they upgraded to “Wow Signal,” a track galvanized by Hancock’s fleet ghost notes and cymbal rushes.
Air Between Us is the next step, giving what was once a transcendent (if transient) sound a real sense of place. The band casts themselves as a ship on the open water—guitar sail, bass rudder, and drum hull—guided by Farr-Morrissey’s lyrical lighthouse. Fason’s guitar tones, once aquiferous, are oceanic here, and Nicholas Wilber’s mix leaves more room for his instrument to breathe. On “Starboard,” his swaying strums like daytime saltwater. On “Avenue You,” his glimmering arpeggios form a tremulous storm that threatens to subsume Alki’s shoreside. In their delicate distortion on “The Landfill,” they replicate blinding sun on sand. Farr-Morrissey, as usual, backs him up with bass lines that trade off buttressing Hancock’s rhythm section with carving out emotive melodies of their own, oftentimes on the same song. Her interplay with Fason has defined Coral Grief since their inception, but where they once sketched, they’re painting with real watercolors here, from the zephyrs of the title track to the beaches of “Rockhounds” to the heat lines of “Outback.”
Such smeary textures and mellifluous vocals have become a sonic shorthand for a place you can go to safely disassociate from whatever’s eroding around you, or maybe to untangle the way you feel about it. Air Between Us, peculiarly, is both. It’s an effortless feat to get sucked into its gentle current and let it subtly shift you. But running underneath that current are urgent words: things are never as eternal as they seem, so appreciate them while they’re here and maintain their memory when they’re not. It’s a message summarized in the chorus of the album’s final song, itself a tribute to a ruin: “While you are no more, everywhere will keep you around.”
Rob Moura is a Seattle-based writer and musician. He’s also a barista, in case you need to know what the restroom code is.
