A house. All the windows are open. The door unlocked, the welcome mat pristine beneath the awning, the threshold tiles clean and white. A still and empty pool in the backyard. All the windows are open. Someone could be home. Nothing is missing.


holds and releases is the sound of water running constantly through white guttering, the sound of leaves sticking to the surface of a pool. The windows and doors are all open, but pain isn’t absent. strathcona pl crafts songs with the intense clarity of vision as expressed by Bethlehem Steel and Parent, whose lyricism holds directness and impassivity in the same hand. A narrative of tension is presented by holds and releases: can we have love without pain? Life without annihilation? Intimacy without trap?


strathcona pl is crafting their silhouette in this balance of precision and distance. Just the name “Strathcona” seems so inhabitable and mappable: a suburb, a neighbourhood, a house. But as “strathcona” improper, where are we? We are drawn back into that same unsureness which permeates the artist’s characteristic sound. If “strathcona” isn’t a location or a proper noun, it must be an adjective; a feeling; a name to behold and release, then hold again.


These songs encapsulate warmth and intimacy just as much as distance and insecurity. strathcona’s vocalist is comforting yet somehow distant, evoking the image of an absent lover. Like Jennylee or YOWLER, her voice flows with precision and knowing restraint. thought you’d be ... she is the voice in your head as you read, re-read her SMS love-letters. Contrast this with the precisely crafted guitar melodies which are so present as to recall the fingers themselves which strum the strings ... a lover playing to you, only you, from the foot of your bed. It can’t be helped to compare thought you’d be or sadder endings with tracks such as Alex Chilltown’s Cwtch or Alex G’s Forever, each song unique in compositional delicacy and technical skill.


seams, too, approaches deterioration through a disoriented haze. seams ebbs and builds in a pulsing of anxiety, without the concomitant resignation we might expect.


It’s because strathcona pl knows the inimitable hunger for desolation. There’s no hesitation from the first answerless question in death means: how do you deepen the experience of life? death means pleads love as an extension of pain and death; because grief, betrayal, loss, of a friendship or a loved one, is only possible from profound connection.


holds and releases is a pouring of love from someone who was always already ready to die.


Like the leaves skimming the pool’s surface, the answer is within the rhetoric of the question – death means never having to say that you’re incomplete. In this way, strathcona pl has created songs for the bottom of the pool: love, death, light, abyss, are all refracted through the blue poolwater; those leaves an echo of life and love, at the water’s skin, and perhaps just too far from reach.


- Larissa Hinds, September 2017.


all proceeds + profits to Rape Crisis Dunedin