Paco Cathcart lets his evocative storytelling ride backseat on his 2018 release, Bag of Holding, his illustrious world-building a secondary component to the lush instrumentation that characterizes each defiantly quiet track. That’s not to say that Cathcart, who records under project name The Cradle, doesn’t have something to say – rather, the sparse anecdotes of past people and places are shared in a way that feels dreamily distant, accented best by a swell of chamber pop orchestration that embeds the entirety of Holding with a sense of pleasant nostalgia and good times. Memories of last year’s New Years Eve, of driving along the eastern seaboard, the long strange trip that lead Cathcart to the present-tense, are presented in a way that feels hazy and bright, the sonic equivalent of looking at an aged photograph of old friends – to speak those memories into the present too aggressively does a disservice to the contemporary, albeit slightly faded context that gives them meaning.
You can catch The Cradle speak truth to memory at The Glove on 11.19, performing alongside Floury, Privacy Issues, and No One & The Somebodies – in the meantime, stream Bag of Holding below. -Connor Beckett McInerney (@b_ck_tt), Photo by Craig Zirpolo