Review: Callum Pitt hangs ‘In the Balance’ with debut album

Callum Pitt whittles existentialism and fate into his debut album, In the Balance. Draped around three particular swipes with death, the nine-track LP speaks to the tenuous nature of human existence, always teetering between the here & now and the soul-clawing afterlife. Pitt relinquishes control over his circumstances, simply reporting the emotional occurrences with sweeping poetic brushes. He turns his pain into a singular art form and allows himself the room to process and cope—inhabiting a space between his own dread about mortality and witnessing hope peeking through the clouds.

With producer John Martindale’s help, Pitt’s work has both a cinematic and intimate feel, as though he’s whispering secrets in the dark while an asteroid crashes into earth. “Stood over your bed like a newborn / The fangs of a cobra, laying at the hooves of a fawn,” he paints with thorny precision in “Black Holes in the Sky,” punctured with a brass section. The song, inspired by a friend’s near-deadly overdose, finds him wrangling with conflicting emotions, each as fevered and boiling as the next. His voice remains soothing and cool as he attempts to make sense of it all. But that’s the very nature of the album. Where “Crow,” for instance, lassoes depression and anxiety with heart-rending earnestness, among his finest moments, “Moths and Butterflies” flutters through the issue of toxic masculinity and pressures to uphold archaic traditions. Pitt is nothing if not raw, honest, and unapologetic with his stories, the mark of a great storyteller. “I push it down because I can’t change the way things are,” he sings on the latter.

Then, there’s “Fraction of a Second,” a slithering performance in which he recounts the time his family almost died in an automobile accident. His words rain down with torrential force. “Well, my little brother told me time is stolen, and the wolves come for everyone,” he sings with particular heaviness, “but I wonder if the wreckage was an omen…” Drums pound the skull, and Pitt’s voice glides, as though angelic and ethereal, into the sky.

In the Balance dots between an array of other themes, from life’s ephemeral magnificence (“More Than This”) to the tug between good and evil (“I Feel a God and Devil in This Room”). He etches his way through the record with the sort of songwriting that swells and bubbles up from the deepest parts of himself. He exhausts his craft. He’s left empty by the end, with a song titled “The Will of the River,” a song dedicated to a friend who died by suicide. “It’s darker now you’re not awake, but my memories are so clear,” he sings over deceptively jaunty production. “We move at the will of the river, and you’re ringing in my ears, in my ears.”

With only nine songs, Callum Pitt manages to exhibit the entire breadth of human existence. In the Balance weaves together sorrow and hope, anger and joy, suffering and redemption. While showing an artist blossoming into their own, the record also signifies that he’s just getting started. He has more room to grow, to play, to experiment. And for that, I can’t wait to hear what he does next.

In the Balance is streaming now.

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