Olive Tiger.
“Gather,” the opening track from Olive Tiger’s latest release, Softest Eyes: Side B, is well-named. Over a bed of tremulous tones, a violin issues a call, something like a hymn. A cello responds with a message of its own. Then there’s an abrupt right turn, into crunchy electronica, hard-hitting percussion. All the elements are brought together for an emotional peak, and then a long, glitchy fall. It’s the sound of people who have done some experimentation and know what they want. It also doesn’t sound quite like anything else.
As the title of the album implies, Softest Eyes: Side B is a continuation of the musical journey Olive Tiger started with Softest Eyes: Side A last year. As before, it centers on the trio of Olive (cello, guitar, and vocals), Jesse Newman (violin, synths, electronics) and John McGrath (drums, percussion). But if Side A felt like the staking out of musical and emotional territory, Side B finds the band exploring that territory, filling in the map, with even greater confidence.
“California,” the next song on the album, is possibly the result of a songwriting prompt given to musicians in New Haven a few years ago to write a song including the line “there is no California anymore.” But the song is more timely than ever. “California is burning,” Olive sings, and then begins to turn in a more psychedelic, transformative direction: “While your fingertips are turning / Blue from the cold that’s creeping / Toward your heart, grateful / Claiming limb by limb, by limb, by limb / I am not afraid.” The music mirrors the arc of the lyrics, as the song built around a guitar line, grows more expansive, verging into the orchestral by its end.
“Cosmic Shrug” proves that Olive Tiger can write a straight-ahead pop song when it suits their interests. Here, however, the music is there to deliver an atypical message for a pop song: “I believe that everything is chaos at random / And we’re all gonna die,” Olive croons. “And I believe that everything has purpose and meaning / And that right now we’re alive / Even though the odds were against us from the start / Somehow we’re still surviving and just look at where we are!” The bright pop melody makes it all go down easy; it’s the kind of song you might find yourself singing before you even know what the words are, and then too late! They’re already in your head.
The song ends on “Crooked,” a song that opens out slowly from elegaic to energetic as it develops. It’s song about the perils of vulnerability, of giving yourself too much to another — but also the allure of it, the way that, if the risk works out, the rewards are many. “I can see it stretched before us, our whole kingdom of the sweet / But its existence is as tenuous as lightning from the heat,” Olive sings. “And though half my lungs are rooting for the avoidance of defeat / The other half can only sing of you in ecstasy.”
That message of transformation — that we find real change simultaneously in ourselves and others, that we must begin the work alone but perhaps can’t finish the work without someone else — unifies Softest Eyes: Side B into a cohesive whole, and points the way forward for more music to come. The band last year suggested that Side B would be only the halfway point. Whether that’s true or not, it’s a major step forward for a band that has had restless energy from the beginning.
Softest Eyes: Side B is available on Bandcamp and all major streaming services.