Introducing you to Art Moore, via their recent single Sixish and their soon to be released self-titled album (ANTI-Records).
The Fader says that Art Moore’s ‘new song “Sixish” is a great example of their ability to paint empathetic portraits of experiences that are both tailored to an individual but feel adaptable to others’. The music is for everyone, but feels completely personal. It has what we ight call in literary criticism, immediacy.
The debut LP from Art Moore, composed of Boy Scouts‘ Taylor Vick and Ezra Furman collaborators and bandmates Sam Duerkes and Trevor Brooks, will be released via ANTI-Records on 5th August 2022.
The album has seen the release of four singles Muscle Memory, Snowy, and A Different Life, and now Sixish.
‘When I first heard the instrumental demo version of Sixish, the choruses had a heavy and heartbroken feeling to them so I tried to write lyrics to match that,” Vick explains. “I wrote about the version of heartbreak that involves a situation where you feel like you’ve got an infinite amount of love and energy to give someone but they’re no longer able to reciprocate.’
Art Moore make vivid, heart-breaking short stories. Each song on the newly formed three-piece’s self-titled debut album is its own individual universe of bittersweet feeling: a brief snapshot of a moment in time that captures the fragility and occasional impossibility of human connection. The ten tracks that comprise their debut album are deft character studies, zeroing in on restless widows, shy beginners, jilted friends and friendly exes, chronicling minute moments — road trips, casual dates, games of truth or dare — with rich detail and subtle wit. The result is a world of remarkable emotional complexity, an album-length study of loneliness, heartache, and loss that’s sweet but never saccharine, sad but never maudlin.
The protagonists of the stories on Art Moore deal with quiet abandonments and casual breakups, the kinds of emotional schisms rarely explored in song. Lead single Snowy, one of Vick’s most incisive and evocative songs ever, focusses on a widow embarking on a road trip without her partner for the first time, slipping between nostalgia and bitterness in split seconds. Lush highlight Sixish sketches a similarly resigned kind of heartbreak, its protagonist feeling short-changed by a manipulative friendship but unable to divorce themselves from it.
‘The way the chorus of Sixish sounded to me at first listen was heart-breaking, so I wanted to write lyrics to match that feeling,’ Vick recalls. Art Moore finds her writing fiction in song for the first time — but the emotions at the core of these songs always ring profoundly true. ‘I think a universally heart-breaking experience is having conflict within a close friendship (or any intimate relationship) where you feel like you’ve got an infinite amount of love and energy to give to someone but they’re not able to reciprocate for whatever reason.’
Songs like Sixish encapsulate the depth and beauty of Art Moore. These are songs about tiny, unspoken feelings rendered on a grand scale, moments that often get brushed aside given the weight that they should be. Across these ten stories, Vick, Brooks and Durkes are unsparing in their focus but remarkably generous in their artistry — three pairs of steady, even hands crafting one fine, precious object.
Photo Credit: Ulysses Ortega
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