Saintseneca with Radiator Hospital

The Columbus, Ohio-based folk-punk band make their long overdue SPACE debut.

Little’s experiences as a teenager in this setting have remained vivid, informing their catalog that begins with a self released, self-titled EP in 2009. After relocating and reforming in Columbus, Ohio, the band earned a dedicated following, performing intimate and charged sets of string-driven DIY folk. Crisscrossing the country in a car on tour brought them national attention, connecting them to Portland, OR based Mama Bird Recording Co., who released their first full-length, LAST.  

In 2014 the band signed with ANTI- releasing their critically acclaimed LP Dark Arc, earning high praise from Pitchfork and landing a NPR Tiny Desk Concert. Their LP Such Things and the Mallwalker EP followed with 2018’s pinnacle Pillar of Na closing their stint with ANTI-.

Highwalllow & Super Moon Songs, their first for Philadelphia indie label Lame-O Records, lands as Saintseneca’s most realized release to date, a twenty-one song opus that is more adventurous than anything prior, yet primed with a pop sense that makes accessing this expansive sonic world effortless. It’s familiar on the landscape but there’s more gravity. Two moons. Strings and synth side by side with drum machine and samples. Unamericana.

“I found that I circled back to the country music that I grew up listening to and always wanted to run from — but then I just wanted to hear it. The voice of George Jones — raw and razor sharp with emotion, the alchemical perfection of Hank Williams’ song writing, Dolly Parton’s crushing melodies. They seemed to effortlessly cut through the air, floating in the atmosphere like perfume even after the songs stopped.

I kept hearing this music in my dreams. It was surreal and penetrating, sweet beyond words. I would wake up and feel it evaporate as I tried to hang on. There’s a way this traditional music sounded in my head and I wanted to coax it into this realm. Take it somewhere weird and true and complicated. The way it really is.”

Little comes off subtly at the surface but the craftsmanship in every phrase he drops is almost crushing. Highwallow… finds his voice at its most elastic, riding the hills of home, buzzing by like a dragonfly, then laying low like an old farm dog.

On “Hot Water Song” he offers:

If it’s true what they say / How the end will come some day / It’s too true to be good

Saintseneca has a hallmark for lyrics that are hopeful yet obliterate that hope in the same verse, only to distill it again more potently by the end:

There’s a hole way down / Where all the people like me have fallen / All in time we will climb back to the light

Highwallow… is bookended by field recordings of a singing harp, one that Little impulsively bought at a used music shop in Columbus, Ohio. It was painted black. As he walked with it held overhead to his car, a gust of wind filled the frame and passed over the strings, sending a crescendo to the cosmos. He climbed on his garage roof with a recorder stuck in the harp and waited for the wind to blow again.

“For me that’s so much of what this album is; the longing to be inhabited by the spirits of creation.”

It was the return of songs, the entry into a world where living is creating.

“Every song that will ever be written already exists. It is simply a matter of becoming available for the wind to pass through you.”

Physical and digital orders will receive the full song world. The streaming release will not include the last six tracks that make up Cinnamon Moon. The band invites listeners to journey a little deeper to find these songs. The second moon brings its own light to bask and walllow in.  

Radiator Hospital is the long-time songwriting project of Philadelphia-based musician Sam Cook-Parrott.