S: "wait"

It doesn’t rain in Seattle, not really. Flecks of water hesitate, shift and remain in the air like sharp, icy dust motes; airborne barnacle bastards, they don’t fall, they cling to you as you pass through. There is no downpour, there is no thunder and there is very little umbrellas can do about any of it. The “rain” in Seattle is simply a bond between cold precipitation and air heavy enough to hold it up just so long.

With their soft male and female vocal exchanges, and long, winding, sad-saturated titles like “Low Budget Soundtrack for the Leaving Scene” or “September, Please, Come Take This Heart Away,” Jenn Ghetto and Matt Brooke of Carissa’s Wierd tapped directly into our little “rain”-soaked hearts. Their eventual breakup left a definitive, chilly rift in the Seattleites and Seattleophiles or kids who were similarly drawn to their sulky, murmured, interlaced pleas and vocal tremblings. (Even though we are admittedly very happy for the time Brooke spent in Band of Horses, and now Grand Archives.)

It is such a relieving thing to hear from Ghetto after all these years and especially after the over-emphasized, raw strains of her own former stab at a solo album under the S moniker, Puking and Crying (which was just as wracked with uncomfortably graphic breakup sentiments and obsessions as it sounds.) But, we understand, right. It can be awhile, sometimes, after epic breakups and fall-outs to re-acquire keel and delicacy. And those are exactly the softspoken, on-the-other-side attributes of “wait”. An attentive treatment of texture and rhythm pulls it together––reassures the song’s own anxieties about its purposefulness. A pairing of banjo rolls and plucked strings, ukulele, supported in a tension of context: bright and cold pinpoint sparks over an electronic hum and long-pulled bars of violin. With Ghetto’s voice rife with pleas and crippled by a very familiar uncertainty.

I’m not going to lie to you: “wait” is a small song fraught with timidity and sentiment set completely a-quiver with lady-sincerity. This isn’t a matured or emboldened effort on Ghetto’s part. It’s a soft song stressing the thin-drawn and cyclonic unrest of being, again, “the careful one” held in the thick of suspense. Worrying about the carefulness; being aware of your own carefulness; to always have a slight inhale held as you worry about the other person’s carefulness. To hold your breath, yes, but to frown and decidedly place nice thoughts, optimistic thoughts, in your whirring mind. To invoke patience and with resolve: tie yourself down tight to that length of a held breath. Not because of certainty, but because of at least certainty in knowing what might be worth this.

Stuttering, emotionally wrought, and with its cup runneth-ing over with potentially off-putting self-consciousness, this opening track is a small and lovely gesture held in tenuous suspension by nothing else but a certain worried pressure in the atmosphere. Or maybe it is the inhale of all us sad, Carissa’s Wierd fans, holding our own breaths.

:: Stream track