Dreary Lake is a 22 minute/8 song mini-album that has such a distinct sonic identity, it feels almost like it exists in a world of its own. Zeitgeisty to the nth degree, Los Angeles songwriter Steven Anthony channels a variety of modern artists like Yves02, The Kid LAROI, and even Juice WRLD or Polo G and combines them with indie/alt sounds to create what essentially feels like a test tube baby made up of contributions from all of them. It’s part sadcore, part emo rap, part indie and extremely distinctive.
On River Thoughts, he also utilises the sombre, sorrowful sounds of Elliott Smith, and there’s maybe even a touch of slacker rock Godfather Steven Malkmus. The minimal acoustic guitar arrangement is seemingly backed by the sound of crickets, and eventually, an electronic beat comes in, and musically, it feels a bit like Gravity Rides Everything by Modest Mouse. The background vocalisations remind us of Bon Iver and The National (specifically their I Am Easy To Find era). Lyrically, the song hints at an abusive relationship with lines like “a broken sink / I will find a way to fix this leak / I will hold you closer than I ever have” – which generate simultaneous feelings of empathy, admiration and concern. As the song nears its end, the beat drops out and the melancholia grows.
On the second track – I Will Not Follow – there’s an almost Interpol feel to proceedings – with a bassy, reverby post-punk vibe emanating from the speakers. Eventually, this is complemented by a dramatic piano part, and when the vocal comes in, it’s sweeter than the one that preceded it, but it’s still imbued with an undeniable sense of sadness. Bittersweet, I think, is the word I’m looking for. After morbid lyrics like “Where will my final rest be? / Can I make it till tomorrow? / Forgive me, don’t forget me / Don’t leave me in dishonor” delivered in an almost Justin Vernon-esque half-falsetto, it concludes. As the mirage of sound dissipates, a solitary piano played by collaborator Evan Ray Clark remains, and it feels like it has soundtracked a wasteland of rotting emotions.
The next song – February 14th – is a collaboration with pianist and vocal coach Yana Golosunova, who lends her dulcet tones to this shimmery dreampop-based lament that focuses on the fleeting, fragile qualities of love. The first lines – “When I stood by you, in the pouring rain / I would assume there was something about the way you looked at me the same” – set the scene perfectly. The vivid lyricism conjures tragic but also romantic imagery, and the couple who are the song’s subject matter feel as doomed as their voices intertwine and sing “don’t you let me, don’t you let me, fall too shallow or fall too fast, what would you want to do?”
Breathe You In is introspective and confessional. At only 2 minutes and 16 seconds, it is an understated acoustic piece built around a gentle arpeggio that feels a little Death Cab-esque. “This isn’t easy at all”, Steven sings as we drown in his continuing anguish. Around halfway through the song, he sings “I thought of you as a medic / you fill the wound with salt”, and it’s the sort of lyric that makes you wince. Coincidentally, it makes us feel a bit like we feel when we hear the Death Cab Summer Skin lyric “on the night you left I came over / and we peeled the deckles from our shoulders” – which isn’t a sensation we experience often.
The Silence follows, and it starts with ambient birdsong before a similar lo-fi acoustic guitar tone to the previous song is introduced. The lyrics here are rather cryptic but undoubtedly also rooted in anxiety and despair. “I don’t want you to suffer / I know that you had another” he sings, and it seems ominous, creepy and foreboding. It feels airy and light, but at the same time heavy and full of concurrent dread and regret. It’s a strange dichotomous feeling. Anthony is clearly a master of conjuring such emotions.
Grey is the most upbeat song so far. It’s by no means jaunty or jovial, by any stretch of the imagination, but the tempo has certainly increased. It starts with an acoustic guitar, but when the bass and vocals kick in, it feels much more produced than the few songs that came before it. Eventually, the vocals soar and the soundscape gets bigger and more beautiful before dissolving. At only 96 seconds long, it wasn’t really ever going to have much of an opportunity to do much else. The birds from the song before continue to chirp away discreetly in the background, which serves as a nice running theme that connects the songs tastefully.
Starting with a synth that blends quickly into an acoustic guitar, Catacombs has a touch of OK Computer-era Radiohead about it as it sees Steven become a bit more animated than he has been thus far. When he sings “baby, what does it take to get you out of those clothes? I’ve been trapped in my thoughts and I’m not leaving alone”, he almost screams in earnestness. Much of the album, he has been measured and level-headed, but on this song, he seems to lose his cool, and the mask appears to slip. He’s been struggling with fighting internal battles throughout the course of the record, but perhaps on this one, the fight is getting the better of him.
Learn How To Sink concludes the album and is a song that we have covered previously. Upon revisiting it today, we’re struck by the way it works as a small part of something larger, complementing the rest of the album perfectly; working together as excellently as the individual parts on this song do. The atmosphere created has been prevalent throughout the album, with the spectre of Bon Iver looming large over this one in particular.
Anthony has taken elements of many and varied influences to make something that is extremely unique, as many excellent artists before him have done.
The album is accompanied by a short film, which you can view on YouTube here.
Written by Kinda Grizzly
