Coming just a year after her last LP, Lily Seabird’s latest, Trash Mountain, is another deep dive into emotionally delicate indie pop-adjacent folk music. The record came together quickly in just a matter of months – after Seabird came home after a series of tours, both for her own music and as a touring bassist for others.
The album (and two song titles) are a reference to the community she lives in, surrounded by other artists and built on a decommissioned landfill in Burlington, Vermont. The connected thread across all nine of these tracks is a stripped-down, almost minimalist approach to soul-bearing. The first single and somewhat title track – “Trash Mountain (1 pm)” – serves as a thesis of sorts for this record. Led off with a harmonica and lazy acoustic guitars, Seabird sings about the emotions involved with coming back home after the quick pace of constantly being on tour. Her distinctive vocals, sounding like the second coming of Lucinda Williams, catalog almost every emotion of being back home and feeling a bit useless. “Trash Mountain (1am)” has a much similar vibe, finding Seabird walking the streets near her house again and logging what she sees, but with a much more melancholy vibe, accentuated by the slower guitar and her languid vocals, making for an even more impactful effect.
Elsewhere, “How Far Away,” accompanied by little more than a piano, is one of the best showcases of Seabird’s stunning vocals; it a starkly beautiful song. “Albany” is another strong track, with Seabird wistfully thinking about the past. The album closes on another delicate piano-laced tune “The Fight,” a meditation on death that lyrically unrolls like a Springsteen song in its description.
Trash Mountain’s sparse arrangements serve the songs about loss, grief, loneliness and uncertainty well. It’s not that far removed from the music Seabird’s fans have come to know but goes a long way to setting the mood and cementing her as an important member of the modern indie folk movement.
