Darlingside, 'Everything Is Alive'

(Thirty Tigers, CD, digital, vinyl)

Boston indie folk act Darlingside are in back-from-summer-break mode on their latest LP, Everything Is Alive. That’s not to say the four-piece, which formed in 2009 at Williams College, has been on some tropical vacation or hiatus. But it’s clear that the band has gone (and is going) through changes.

First and foremost, there’s been a sonic shift. Traditionally, the heft of Darlingside’s sound has come from their Power Rangers-esque ability to join their voices. Don Mitchell, Auyon Mukharji, Harris Paseltiner and David Senft have made five albums drenched in harmonies. While the quartet still flexes those muscles on songs such as “Eliza I See,” the boys go it alone more often than not on Everything Is Alive, taking turns on lead vocals throughout.

There’s no let-up from song to song, as there are no weak links in Darlingside’s vocal armor. But that variation creates a new kind of album from the band.

It’s fitting for a group that took its name from the “murder your darlings” mantra coined by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch to be fixated on change. Everything Is Alive is a record obsessed with shifting tides, the impermanence of life and the fear of becoming stagnant.

“I’m the same as I ever was, same as I ever will be, / Goddamn canonical me, / A buoy in the ocean of eyes unclosed, / Every headline is a footnote,” Mukharji sings on “Lose the Keys.”

That motif of fear of quiescence pervades a record that could be addressing modern American life just as surely as it tells the story of one person’s resistance to change. The speaker on “All the Lights in the City” seems to know something is coming to an end but isn’t sure what it means. “In the halcyon days in the twilight of the empire, / It is morning in the city as real as anyone,” Senft sings before concluding that “the path of least resistance will wear you out.”

Darlingside always balance their lyrical sophistication and vocal prowess with lush sonic surroundings, and Everything Is Alive is no exception. Though the four members seem to be distancing themselves from one another as singers and songwriters, they’re clearly still of one mind when it comes to arrangements. The way “Darkening Hour” hangs in the air, the space between notes elevating it like a black balloon, speaks to a group in close control of its sound. The band can go effortlessly from deceptively simple on songs such as “How Long Again” to complex in its rhythms, as on “Baking Soda.”

Darlingside are changing, and they want you to know it. And, as they strive to convey throughout Everything Is Alive, that’s a good thing.

Everything Is Alive is available on all major streaming services. Darlingside play the Higher Ground Ballroom in South Burlington on Friday, December 8.

This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2023.