The Huntress and Holder of Hands and Footings with What’s Left of John Bisbee and Sierra D’Amours

Stalwart New England folkies join forces for a night of uncommon song. Rare solo sets by MorganEve Swain, John Bisbee, Sierra D’Amours, and a full band offering from Footings.

When, a week before her 28th birthday, MorganEve Swain lost her husband and musical partner, Dave Lamb, to leukemia, the world did not stand still. April continued into May, breath continued its rhythm through the bodies of the living and in their studio in Warren, Rhode Island, MorganEve continued to record bass, strings and vocals into a laptop because it’s what she’d always done.

For the previous six years, she and Lamb had existed professionally as the duo Brown Bird, gaining a loyal international following through intensive touring and the original music they created, praised for its honesty and expression of the human condition. Without Dave, and in honor of him, MorganEve became The Huntress and Holder of Hands: a young widow pursuing the white stag of grief through a foreign wilderness, intent on maintaining the sense of wonder and compassion with which her partner lived his life.

In 2016, with the ambition to perform live, The Huntress and Holder of Hands expanded into a 5-musician entity, employing cello, bowed string bass, electric bass and drums with MorganEve primarily on five-string viola and guitar. As a band, The Huntress and Holder of Hands builds harmony, strings and bass-driven pieces influenced by post-metal, blues and Americana and offers an intense musical and lyrical experience that explores love, loss, power and strength.

MorganEve self-released The Water Street Demos EP in November 2015. The band’s first full-length album, Avalon, was released on September 15, 2017. The Huntress and Holder of Hands is working on their second album to be released in the coming year.

Footings is the long-running/rocking outgrowth of Peterborough NH’s great ruralist duo, Redwing Blackbird. Initially formed as a trio in 2012 by Eric Gagne on guitar and vocals, Footings’ sound embraces a sort of inner light derived from folk music, but surrounds it with a variety of rockist tropes. This rock action can take many forms, especially on this new album, which features their most expanded/expansive line-up yet.

Original trio member Elisabeth Fuchsia (frequent Pile collaborator) is on viola and long-time collusionist Candace Clement provides guitar, synth and vocals. Jordan Holtz (from Rick Rude) supplies vocals. Ben Rogers (Eric’s bandmate from Death to Tyrants) adds drums where needed. Will Killingsworth (Ampere/Bucket Full of Teeth) adds pedals and tambourine as required. The latter pair were also responsible for engineering the album, but their musical additions are sonically notable.

Gagne’s songs and deep vocals, often the core of the band’s operation, combine the literary qualities of a heavy reader with the observational data of a poet. In this, Footings might occasionally be mistaken for one of Will Oldham’s multifarious projects. But the band has a distinct way of scrambling their eggs, and that was never clearer than it is here. Full songs are interspersed with fragmentary shards in a way that reminds me of how Michael Hurley faded out “Rat Face” after its intro, on Hi Fi Snock Uptown. I mean, “Sleeping” sounds tantalizingly close to a Neil Young penned out-take from Deja Vu for the 35 seconds it runs. But that’s all there is!

This outré editing process works quite well. By allowing themselves to create slivers of textural similarity to Sonic Youth (“Ordinary Night”), Crazy Horse (“Sleeping”), and even Heldon (“Wouldn’t It Be Something”), Footins display wide possibilities while maintaining their primary focus on creating a kind of avant garde American roots music with the brash complexity of Yo La Tengo and the stately depth of Wilco.

Annihilation is the best Footings record to hit the planet yet. And that is saying something.”
– Byron Coley