Austin’s The Lovely Sparrows have been at it since 2005, and “Edge of the Collapse” is the opening track from their forthcoming album I Still Picture You Running, out earlier this month. Founder and songwriter Shawn Jones has been building this project for two decades now, and the band’s resume is solid: Pitchfork, Spin, and Paste coverage in their earlier years, appearances at SXSW and CMJ, and a 2008 album in Bury the Cynics that made a lot of year-end lists. Robert Ellis also spent time in the band before going on to his own career, and Jones produced Ellis’s debut. The song itself sits in that space between observation and resignation, watching familiar structures quietly lose their grip without making a big deal about it.
The most obvious element that sets this song and the band’s style apart from the wider gamut of music in the yacht-rock genre is the rhythm. The drum section specifically feels like it’s pulled from a math rock song or a genre where syncopated rhythms help create an “endless pursuit” sound as the harmony races around it. I think The Lovely Sparrows successfully managed to merge those two things, that sense of nostalgia and the theme of pursuit of new endeavors, and bravely taking on the unknown that the open sea symbolizes, and that is heavily alluded to in the lyrics and cover art of the album.
“I Still Picture You Running” pulls from ambient loops, 60s minimalist textures, and 70s prog passages, so if this track is any indication, the full album is worth sitting with. Jones has always written lyrics that function more like fragments of half-remembered dreams than conventional songwriting, and that approach fits the mood here. Twenty years in, The Lovely Sparrows still sound like they’re creating something fresh rather than repeating a formula.
