Amy O - Elastic - CASSETTES

Double vinyl LP pressing housed in gatefold jacket. Includes poster. 2024 . Only God Was Above Us was Inchinspired and haunted by 20th Century New York CityInch and recorded in such far-flung locales as Tokyo, London, Los Angeles, and Manhattan. The album was co-produced by VW's Ezra Koenig and regular collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid, mixed by Dave Fridmann, and mastered by Emily Lazar. / The album title comes from the photo on the album cover by Steven Siegel, and other photos from his InchSubway DreamInch series documenting a Jersey City junkyard in the late-'80s.

On 'Mirror, Reflect', Amy O returns to form as she documents hertransition into motherhood in the early days of the pandemic. Initiallyconceived as a lo-fi endeavor to record songs made with friends in thosedays of uncertainty, Mirror, Reflect is an intimate and exploratory workthat weaves collected home and field recordings with shimmeringsynths and Oelsner's playful lyricism.A stalwart presence in the indie-pop underground since 2012, Oelsnershifted her approach to record making on 'Mirror, Reflect' to emphasizeprocess over product, with the resulting songs born out of a myriad ofhome sessions, song-a-day projects, songwriting workshops and onlinecollaborations. This kind of patchwork, home-spun approach wasfamiliar to Oelsner, who made her name with her sparkling, homemadepop songs before releasing three studio albums, including her mostrecent album, 2019's Shell.'Mirror, Reflect' gently shrugs o the sheen of those studio albums, as anearly prenatal recording of Oelsner's daughter's heartbeat opens therecord in the near-ambient instrumental prelude of InchHoneyInch-a wonderfully nuanced dispatch from the dog days of summer that's under-belliedby both the precarity and beauty of the early months of infancy and newmotherhood. Oelsner's knack for finding magic in the mundane is alsodeeply apparent on InchDribble Dribble,Inch where the stick-with-you nature ofthe playful rhyme schemes of the children's books that became a regularpart of her literary intake are worked into a lilting reflection on resilience,destruction and loss.Oelsner's initiation into motherhood is inseparable from the poetic heartof 'Mirror, Reflect', but the album is also largely informed by the shifts inOelsner's relationship to herself. Through playful and emotionally acuteobservations, Amy O turns the potentially contractive experiences ofmotherhood, isolation, family and aging into a freewheelin

Amy Oelsner's homemade pop songs sparkle with these eternal truths that story-telling is part of being alive, and excavating the past is part of growth. Oelsner, who records as Amy O, is a lifer of the indie-pop underground for whom songwriting is a way of processing the passing of time. Her latest, Shell, brims with poetic granular details of everyday life; it's her third studio album, and tenth including her many years of home recordings. Following 2017's Elastic, Oelsner continues living up to that album's namesake Shell similarly stretches with melodies upon melodies. But here there is greater use of space and pace and patience. Perfectly minimal riffs slowly build, ebb, erupt and recoil; guitars and keys layer and swell; there are moments of steady piano-pop, intricate drums and pristine criss-crossing vocal melodies. On Shell, Oelsner deals in the outer and inner boundaries of self. She grapples with mortality, physical transiency and vulnerability, the concept of home. There are homages to the formative relationships that shape our lives, imperfect as they may be. There are meditations on the mundane daily routines that support mental and physical health; in her description of it, Oelsner wanted to honor invisible processing, the inward emotional labor that often goes unseen, the type of internal work that is Inchnot encouraged by society and can make you feel like you're disap- pearing.Inch For Oelsner, music is a way of connecting with herself, her personal history and context. Going into the process of writing Shell, she says InchI was noticing a gap forming between my 'adult' self who was moving forward with her life and parts of my younger self that were stuck behind and hadn't yet caught up. The process of writing and recording Shell played a big role in helping to get some of those stuck parts of myself caught up and able to join me in the present so