There’s a high chance you’ve brushed past Stephen Steinbrink – or at least one of his twinkling songs – since the release of his break out album ‘Arranged Waves’. The well traveled singer/songwriter has spent the last two years touring endlessly, high and low, solo and with a band, across two continents.
Despite the miles that particular magnificent release has put on, there is so much more to the airy melodies and lo-fi serenades that Steinbrink offers. With a huge back-catalogue of alternative pop releases between 2011-2014, with and without his band The French Quarter, allow any new listener to mine his music for hours with beautiful results.
Melodic records have just announced they will be releasing Steinbrink’s latest, entitled Anagrams, on July 1st. True to form, the album announcement was preceded with a lengthy list of US tour dates. Steinbrink told Stereogum last week that “lately writing songs almost makes the world seem more chaotic, like I keep digging up [and] reburying the same old bone….“.
It’s easy to see this in his work. The constant “reburying” of anxieties, dreams and emotions inside a mesh of playful and tidy pop melodies is something Steinbrink accomplishes deftly. Release after release, new single ‘Absent Mind‘ included, is so immaculately constructed that you can almost hear the faintest notions of doubt as the song finishes and Steinbrink graceful chorus chimes “when you want to die, you start to lie….“. As if he is asking himself, off mic as the reels click, did I just convey those feelings again in such a blissful expression? The world’s apparent chaos continues, for now, in this delicate single.