Catch Prichard - "Going Crazy" - the stuff of the dark, the light, the ghosts, the flesh

When you hear Going Crazy by Catch Prichard you might feel an actual shift happen. A shift of emotion, you might twist a bit in your chair or cross your arms. It might be because the sonic effect is a bit mind bending. The music from the onset feels like sad core folk but inhabits some other world and then when you hear the low vocal aesthetic of singer, songwriter, composer Sawyer Gebauer that other world feels darker and more gloomy. Gebauer's vocal command is as heavy as a thick wool blanket and the way in which he phrases his lyrics, hanging on syllables and pulling on them like salt water taffy is astounding and unique. As Catch Prichard, he crafts his brand of gothic folk that hangs in the air like a thick fog. The kind that pours over the coast of Big Sur and snakes through the coastal forest. Sawyer moved to Sweden from the midwest at 19 forming and fronting Brittsommar, a musical outfit that took off in Europe with members seemingly in constant rotation. Once he returned to the states, his new project / moniker as "Catch Prichard" materialized as well as an evocative five song EP called "Eskota" named after the Texan ghost town where the album was crafted. 

Going Crazy is the first glimpse of his latest 6 song EP "Utter Disbelief", the first collection of a 16 song series coalesced out Gebauer's baritone voice, out of the box drum machines, gritty Mellotron and stories built on the narratives of life, the vulnerability of the human condition. Of the new songs, Sawyer Gebauer shares: 

 “When I recorded in the past, the process was powered by my immediate surroundings - a Berlin warehouse, an abandoned synagogue hitched to a frozen lake, a broken Brooklyn flat. This new collection was mostly recorded in the late night silence at the edge of my bed. It is a musical reflection of all that influenced and fed me for so many years. Call it a personal homage to the artists and music that have been so good to me.  All the melodies and sounds that mine the secret this old world has hidden in its claws.”

"Utter Disbelief" drops 2/22/2019.

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Robb Donker