The heavens open up and God’s hairy forearm shoots forth from the clouds, slapping the word Songwriter across your body’s fragile avatar. And now the question: is it a calling or is it a curse? Will you draw the sword from the lake, victorious and gleaming? Or will your skin crawl with boils, your crops alight in conflagration? Is the habit of song writing something rewarding and nutritive, like gardening? Or is it more of a dirty tic, like bumming a cigarette every time you drink two beers? Is writing songs a job? A holy duty? Or is it just an occasionally rewarding hobby? And if I do heed my destiny, just how the fuck am I supposed to pay for healthcare?
Such are the celestial backyard wrestling matches that make up Sinai Vessel’s fourth LP. “I SING“, what a phrase – chief songwriter Caleb Cordes wields a DIY lifer’s gallows humour as he tries to carve out a niche in stone with a grapefruit spoon, speaking truth to streaming royalties and trust fund powers. Crucially, though, Sinai Vessel never says “fuck you” to the listener – instead Cordes shakes his head, laughing, and says instead “fuck me.”
How preposterous it is to be yoked to song, how silly to squeeze considered noise into plastic, how absolutely goofy is it that any of us listen, that any of us are moved. And in some unlikely screwball miracle, within the vanishing middle class vocation of singing for your supper, Sinai Vessel achieves the improbable: grace, resonance, a truly great collection of tunes.
Sinai Vessel from the new album ‘I SING’ out July 26th, 2024 via Keeled Scales.
The Fat Angel Sings 