Record Revue: Crystal Boxersox, Eddie the Kidd, Fickle Friends & The Whitmore Sisters

Welcome to Record Revue, an EP and album review series

It’s a new year, for better or worse. I took January off from the blog, hoping to be inspired and discover what will be the year’s first great records. It was largely a slower month in releases, but as you’ll see below, several artists did not disappoint. As always, I have wildly eclectic taste and the very first album round-up of the year reflects that. Several moments stopped me totally in my tracks, evoking long-lost memories from my childhood, while other songwriting moments injected a healthy dose of serotonin into my system. We all need a jolt every now and then, and these four albums do that and much more.

Crystal Boxersox, The HitchHiker

In “Dead People’s Things,” Crystal Bowersox reflects upon the circle of life through material things. When my parents died, I had to sort through their belongings, separating out assorted clothes and accessories to go to charity and packing away sentimental trinkets to collect dust in my apartment. Everything else was discarded in a dumpster. All said and done, we’re fragile beings with nothing to show for our existence but things. Things. Things that’ll wind up in thrift stores and in someone else’s house. The delicate ballad lies at the emotional core of HitchHiker, Boxersox’s first record in four years. The rustic songwriter scatters other matters of the heart across the 13 piece, from suffocating isolation (“The Loneliness”) and sexual assault (“The Storm”) to heartache (“Slow Dance”). A tremendous body of work, woven with rugged country teardrops and a soul-rending power, proves she is just getting started.

Fickle Friends, Are We Gonna Be Alright?

“I was so broken, a frozen statue / I wasn’t moving forward,” Natassja Shiner sidewinds through a glassy sand-dune compiled of synths and grooves. “Glow” sparkles, radiating an emotional glare. It’s an all-encompassing passage to situate the album’s overarching psychological state: dancing away depression. Are We Gonna Be Alright? asks this simple, profoundly troubling question, one which looms over our everyday lives. There doesn’t appear to be a proper answer, but it doesn’t matter. Like understanding the meaning of life, it’ll never be something we actually want to hear. The band’s second proper full-length pivots between other sequin-stitched synth-works that just feel good (“Pretty Great,” “Love You to Death”) and personally wrought admissions of a fragile mental state (“Not Okay,” “Won’t Hurt Myself”). It’s a 12-track shuffleboard that’s not totally unlike their previous efforts but carries with it an inescapable warming agent. Shiner and her bandmates wrap you up in their stories as a way to come to peace with their own raging turmoil. If anything, it may assuage your own pressures, too.

Eddie the Kidd, Seeing Stars EP

Eddie the Kidd plugs you into a lush soundboard, electricity pounding through your fingertips. His Seeing Stars EP is a feverish, dreamy, and pastel set, serving as a followup to his 2019 full-length record Sleep Talk. “I just like the energy,” he coos through parted lips on “Fever.” And you’ll most certainly agree, as you gulp down all six songs. Through reality-inducing production, the Dallas native mischievously zig-zags across synths with the precision of a python. “Gregory” bubbles with wistfulness for a former relationship, nearly leaving you totally exasperated, whereas “Cooler,” a collab with Côtier, punctures the room with a chillier temperature, enough to send chills along the nape of your neck. The Kisos-starring “Lunar Tide” does colossal damage to the eardrums, a disastrously addicting strip of fruity bubblegum, and sets up the record’s cosmic tones. Seeing Stars injects serotonin directly into your veins, and we don’t mind. No, not one bit.

The Whitmore Sisters, Ghost Stories

Life burns in extremes. When joy isn’t filling us up, tragedy incinerates our world — and it’s frequently the latter which defines us most. With their first joint record, The Whitmore Sisters, comprised of Americana mainstays Bonnie and Eleanor, write a collection of letters about death, loss, and heartache, barely held together with twine and wrapped gently in crinkly brown paper. Ghost Stories is far from a superficial volume of stories; they’re dipped in their own experiences, left out in the sun to dry, and delivered with supple wisdom. “Friends We Leave Behind” laments those friendships ripped apart and scattered to the wind, whereas the title track commemorates lives lost by police brutality. Whether they barrel full-throttle with a cover of Aaron Lee Tasjan’s groovy “Big Heart Sick Mind” or spiral into the ether with the harp-bound “Greek Tragedy,” Bonnie and Eleanor wearily deliver 11 songs with vision and grace.

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