Last month, two magnificent records were unleashed to the world: Hand Habits’Wildly Idle (Humble Before the Void) and Mega Bog’s Happy Together. Both hit hard for different reasons—the first captures the collisions of the natural world and our lives in dreamy guitar landscapes, while the latter rides the unpredictable whims of the saxophone through jazz-pop frenzies like it’s an escaped circus elephant lumbering toward freedom.
Meg Duffy released her woodsy solo debut under the moniker Hand Habits, though she’s spent the past few years playing in Mega Bog and Kevin Morby’s band. Wildly Idle unfolds slowly and without pretension, like a hillside of flowers blooming overnight. Duffy begins the album with a hollowly echoed disclaimer, “I know I’m not the picture-perfect vision made in your mind,” as though she’s apologizing for the mess before we step into her head. Its 13 tracks expand across vast plains of sound, led by the aimless meander of light-filled guitar tones. Standout “Sun Beholds Me” typifies Wildly Idle—it’s subtly haunting, with earthy lyrics like “I am lemongrass, you are lavender” rooting its spacy, astral melodies in the ground. The whole album sounds like Duffy’s learning to accept the constant presence of “the void” right next to life, but vowing to grow despite it.
If you live in the Pacific Northwest and aren’t yet a disciple of Mega Bog, please baptize yourself immediately. Happy Together is the Seattle/Brooklyn band’s beautifully strange follow-up to 2014’s Gone Banana. Frontwoman Erin Birgy conducts abstract symphonies where, somehow, art-pop and jazz coexist harmoniously. A clarinet inserts itself into the otherwise straightforward pop melody of “TV MAC,” but saxophone is the album’s true wild card—it pierces the misty atmospherics of “192014,” flurries throughout opener “Diznee,” and provides harsh bursts of percussion in “London.” Closing track “Fwee” is markedly peaceful compared to the rest of Happy Together. Birgy’s vocals are feathery, her lyrics less surreal as she sings, “How could I have known/There’s a person out there who means me no harm.” If you want to see two wildly different songwriters bend and twist pop music into new shapes, Birgy and Duffy are not to be missed.