Lost in the Trees – All Alone in an Empty House (Anti)

When the title track begins the album, the music has a folk-charm that is unassuming. Before you realize what you’re stepping into, a spectral aria and classical strings soar above the confessional that is being laid out. The narrator cries out after finding his murdered baby buried in the garden: “For all I care ‘cause I hate your soul / and how I hate your soul / oh will the church protect me?”

Once you read back the lyrics, you hear the loathsome words beneath all that misleading mellifluousness: “I spent my whole life on you / and build you a gorgeous house / to put up with your bitched mouth.”

As my best friend says, “these lyrics are fucking death threats.”

By the middle of the first song you want to find out how it turns out. You’re into the next song and then you’re hooked. There’s no going back, there’s only being present to listen to the album unfold. Nine heartbreaking stories about regret and redemption, leaving and loss, and two classical pieces anchor it down at each end.

These mini-symphonies – or sketches – give the album a cinematic aura. Certainly, this is how we moderns deal with classical musical pieces: they are as scores to a movie. For All Alone in an Empty House, the classical sketches are unified with folk sensibilities and I wouldn’t even have called them out unless they stood on their own or read the back of the liner notes: “Inspiring a new generation through classical music.”

In every song the orchestra is present. “Walk around the Lake” has strings and a choir that charge like flying monkeys while a Theremin adds to the anxiety of the song. These elements are integral to the story, the represent the unsaid moments that drive the narrator to “ease your mind / all it takes / is a walk around the lake.” You know something is off and are indicators that make you wonder what drama led him there.

Do not classify the band with other folk contemporaries like Fleet Foxes or the classics like Simon & Garfunkel, both of whom are greats in their own right. For a debut, the album feels like a complete full step forward. Ari Picker – the bands vocalist and composer – has a complete vision more akin to a director. Parallels are more easily drawn with Owen Ashworth from Casiotone for the Painfully Alone because of the skill both have in great storytelling and cinematography.

The album has an arc and with it a mood that is undeniable. They make songs for a painter “who has lost both of her hands / and a song is for the wanderer / who never came home again.” Sepia and sadness alone could drive an album and on the surface of these 11 songs, each one is tinted with an antiquated filter and North Carolinian gentility. Lost in the Trees do not only recreate a mood from an ancient hey-day, a skill that the likes of M. Ward is more deft. A contradiction with All Alone in this Empty House is that the songs feel fresh and new – maybe the orchestral moments add to that feel – and the stories are cast in a current vernacular.

And there is magic: it’s in the little details. There are clues about self-discovery and self-reliance. There is hope and a giant heart behind every lyric that give the album flight. The details are everywhere, in the knots of the songs like the gentle sounds of raking in the title track and the creak of the soft shoe that evokes sounds of walking up the steps in that big empty house.

There is magic in this band from Chapel Hill.

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