BELLA1639 // 7 March 2025

With sober, unvarnished vocals front-and-center of the mix like never before in Stratton’s music, the true focus of these songs is the captured, storied souls they contain. This approach calls to mind Lee Hazlewood’s album Trouble is a Lonesome Town—tuneful portraits of an assembly of people lit in sharp relief against the ravages of the West—but many of the touchstones for this work are more filmic or literary than musical. Most of these songs occupy an entirely independent point of view - some are driven mad, some paranoid, some wistful, and in one thrilling instance the narration zooms out entirely, evoking the prehistoric sequences from Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. Stratton gives each new fictional perspective beautifully specific verbiage—who else could manage to squeeze "AQI," "Tioga Pass," and "Victorville" into rhyming phrases?—that gives them an eerie, realistic quality. The silver-tongued mortgage spells of a real estate agent selling what is known to be a doomed property, in “Higher and Drier”—is buying a house in California necessarily a deal with the devil? One can't help but be reminded of Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Inherent Vice - the ensemble cast, the film grain excellence, the general California-ness, the impending sense of doom. There are similarities in scope and pace, too, to the work of filmmaker Kelly Reichardt who, especially in the film Old Joy, lets dialogue wither among the grandeur of the trees. And much like in Richard Powers’ tree opus The Overstory, these characters’ lives in the shadows of the Earth are interconnected in deed and through the generations, interwoven like an ever-tightening snare grabbing the leg of a passing fox.