Music Review: Bad Posture Club, A Place Between
Minneapolis-based folk duo Bad Posture Club serenade the beautiful and terrible parts of life on their gorgeous second album.
Bad Posture Club, A Place Between album artwork, 2021.
From the opening notes, Bad Posture Club’s new album signals that this is going to be a calm and lovely experience. Morning relaxation music. Evening wind-down tunes. Partners in life and music Maren Day and Morgan Kavanagh have created something truly beautiful that at first seems like it’s going to be an oasis of quiet repose. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a banjo played quite so sweetly and softly, or harmonies so pretty and ethereal.
But there’s a difference between pure relaxation and deeper contemplation. You can let this breathlessly lovely music waft over you while you clear your mind of stress and thought, or you can let some of the lyrics enter your consciousness. And then the album becomes quite a different experience.
A Place Between is actually a complex blend of stories, some about the past, some rooted in the here and now, and even one set in a not-unthinkable apocalyptic future. The simple beauty of mundane details of life brush up against unsettling scenarios and imagery. Quiet calm is disrupted by lyrics that remind us what life is really like—the best intentions of living in peace and appreciating our world can’t stave off unexpected twists of fate and the harder realities that are all around us.
But on the other hand, stories of desperation and grief are interrupted by moments of sheer loveliness. It’s not a one-way street; the beautiful and terrible coexist, and one or the other might gain the upper hand at any moment on this album.
I was trying to think of phrases that sum up this contrast: Lullabies for the end days. Peaceful apocalyptic. Lilting devastation. I don’t think any of them are quite right, but they might start to give you a sense of what you’re in for with this album.
Bad Posture Club: Morgan Kavanagh (l) & Maren Day (r) at a private backyard concert July 18, 2021. Photo by Jaclyn Nott.
Really, if you’re listening closely, the very first line on the first song clues you in: “Whippoorwill, you’re not singing anymore / you’re just crying at my window.” The song goes on to observe the wind, a star, an apple tree. All beautiful but with an edge of darkness. Are they metaphors for a stormy relationship with a human, or emblematic of the tension that exists between a person and precious but ultimately unknowable nature? It works either way.
The next song, “Orange Thunder,” is a slice-of-life vignette rooted in evocative descriptions of everyday chores. Whether they’re suffering from depression or just beaten down by life, the narrator finds a way to get through life by giving each daily task special attention, for instance lovingly washing a cutting board like it’s “a baby in the sink,” noting “criss-cross marks smelling of onion skins / with the yellow Dawn, I’ll make her new again.”
Unlike many of the songs, which I could interpret a number of ways, “First Apartment” to me speaks very, very specifically of life in Minneapolis in late spring 2020. In the terrible first months of the pandemic lockdown, a man was murdered by another man kneeling on his neck, about a mile from my home. The world cried out and we were in the epicenter, with acrid smoke in the air, helicopters droning overhead, National Guardsmen and white supremacists striking fear in different (but not completely unlike) ways as they roamed our streets.
“First Apartment” brought it all back to me, every single line. The fear: “the helicopter sounds / and the neighbors banging on pots & pans / in case the enemy is around.” The beauty (I don’t know if it was an unusually beautiful spring or if I clung to the the sights of nature to help my state of mind): “all the while right outside / my garden knows to grow / pulling weeds, fever dreams / pretend I have control.” And the feeling that all of this was overdue justified rage in a city that had ignored its own racism and police brutality for too long: “stores closed down, or else burned out … it’s not stealing to take what’s owed / take all that shit, the debt’s still whole.” The last verse ties the beauty of spring and the pain of everything else together: “I planted a brown eyed sue / one blossom for every sorrow, the whole street went up in bloom.”
Bad Posture Club’s Morgan Kavanagh. Photo by Jaclyn Nott, 2021.
The next song, “Strangers,” recounts the narrator’s long-divorced parents sharing an amicable chance meeting, and becomes an ode to the narrator’s father, his generosity and his successes: “he grew up racing sailboats on Lake Michigan / there’s nothing that he can’t do if he tries.” But even this rather sweet vignette has an edge to it, the father saying in a phone conversation, “I’m fine though I think that we live in an experiment / going horribly right just like they planned at the start.”
“Prairie Flower” is a relatively carefree ode to the changing of seasons, though at this point I was so attuned to looking for elements of turmoil that metaphors like “prairie flower wildfire” and “ghost white birch” had me questioning whether the song was really as lighthearted as it seemed. But had I heard it outside the context of the album, that’s what I would’ve assumed.
“Mountain” is another tribute to nature, with a nostalgic bent this time as the narrator thinks wistfully of home: “Mountain, you’re my childhood bedroom … to leave it now is like leaving a lover.” The second verse however seems to be from the POV of the mountain itself, who is far less sentimental: “as for you easy come easy go / if you die on the way I’ve been good to know.” The narrator continues bonding with and rhapsodizing over the mountain’s beautiful natural elements, but it took on a slightly different cast as I imagined the place being slightly sentient and entirely neutral to the narrator’s existence.
Bad Posture Club’s Maren Day. Photo by Jaclyn Nott, 2021.
All the songs on the album are written by Kavanagh save one penned by Day, “Walking Teacher.” The sparse, haiku-like lyrics paint a poignant picture of the narrator visiting a family member or friend who’s in declining mental or physical health: “once my walking teacher, I could hold on / now you hold me, quiet safety / hello, hello, hello / I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.” The arrangement is equally spare, one or two guitars providing gentle rolling arpeggios, punctuated only toward the end by a few piano notes. If piano came into the album before this, it was too subtle for me to notice, but in such a minimalist song, each soft note resonates with emotion.
With its sweet harmonies and gently loping banjo, “End Days” doesn’t necessarily stand out as starkly different from the other songs on the album, but the lyrics are the most explicitly pessimistic, painting a picture of a sad declining future world that I wished sounded a little more fictional or inconceivable than it does: “What’s it like to be a girl trying to make it in the end days? … I don’t know where to go / if it’s not burning then it’s freezing.” The apocalypse described by Bad Posture Club is depicted as scary—“maybe I want to be close to my family when the quake finally makes us shake”—but also kind of boring at times: “no more surprises, it’s a dull knife blade / just another of those end days.” It’s a brilliant song and unfortunately hits almost as close to home as “First Apartment” did.
Bad Posture Club: Morgan Kavanagh (l) & Maren Day (r). Photo by Jaclyn Nott, 2021.
The album closes with another nostalgic song with several twists. Although the childhood described sounds mostly idyllic—“we raced horses down I-5 / and we crossed the finish line first everytime”—there’s turmoil from the very first line of the song: “My parents met at an AA meeting / everything after that is history repeating.” And the narrator’s experiences aren’t all happy either (“there was magic there and it came at a cost”). The song and the album leave us on a disquieting note: “and I’m calling out crying, half-way up a tree and trying / to escape a pack of dogs that I heard but never saw / everything else after that is history repeating.” That haunting piano comes back in as Kavanagh and Day repeat the last line over and over; a single piano note is the last thing you hear before the album ends.
Ready to hear it for yourself? Buy A Place Between on Bandcamp as a download, CD or cassette - yeah you heard me right!
Listen to “First Apartment”
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the main music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym @taberkeley!
