{"id":1192651,"date":"2026-09-08T05:02:17","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T05:02:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1192651\/"},"modified":"2026-09-08T05:02:17","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T05:02:17","slug":"lily-seabird-lightspheres-on-their-way-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1192651\/","title":{"rendered":"Lily Seabird: Lightspheres on Their Way Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lily Seabird<\/a> has a history of finding beauty in sordid places. Her stage name was borne of an insult riffing off her actual last name, Seward: An ex-boyfriend disdainfully said she ought to be called \u201cLily C-word,\u201d before a friend compared her more favorably to a \u201cseabird.\u201d Her last record, Trash Mountain, was named for a decommissioned dump on which she and other artists shared a beloved home. On her latest, Lightspheres on Their Way, she chooses seemingly unexpected moments to swap out her raspy, twangy voice for a more straightforwardly beautiful tone. Her voice never sounds more crystalline, for example, than when she opens a track by singing\u2014with utter sweetness\u2014about \u201cvomiting in the Whole Foods.\u201d<\/p>\n

The twang comes courtesy of her childhood in rural Pennsylvania, where Seabird lived before moving to New York City for college. The expense and the scale of the city overwhelmed her, so she dropped out; she fared better in the bucolic landscapes of Burlington, Vt., where she crashed with a friend for a weekend and decided she never wanted to leave. She\u2019s lived there now for the better part of a decade, part of a burgeoning indie-rock scene that also includes Greg Freeman<\/a> and Robber Robber<\/a>.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

Seabird has a particularly close musical relationship with Freeman; they were early cheerleaders for each other\u2019s work and have since played on each other\u2019s records. Like him, she mines the DNA of rootsy forebears to make empathetic, rambling rock songs; there\u2019s a little Gillian Welch<\/a>, a little Adrianne Lenker<\/a> in her languid, forlorn voice; some Crazy Horse<\/a> in her latest album\u2019s thrashier breakdowns; something vaguely Springsteen<\/a>ian in her rugged resolve. On Lightspheres, she refines her singular perspective as a songwriter, one continually willing to seek out glimmers of redemption among detritus.<\/p>\n

Loss and grief have long been embedded in Seabird\u2019s music, including many songs written in the aftermath of a friend\u2019s suicide. She continues to mine these themes on Lightspheres, pondering \u201cthe great divide of the living and those who chose not to,\u201d singing of a spirit that \u201chaunts these halls like a ghost of the undead.\u201d Nearly all the album\u2019s songs are beset by existential questions: \u201cWhat choice is there if there\u2019s nothing left to lose?\u201d; \u201cHow\u2019d we get so far from where we started?\u201d; \u201cWill I regret every choice I ever made?\u201d There\u2019s an ease in the way she lets her lines tumble into each other\u2014deceptively conversational but gutting upon closer inspection, the weight of her words underscored by lap steel, harmonium, and cello.<\/p>\n

Often, Seabird presents music itself as a transcendent force, an answer to some of her most pressing queries. On \u201cSlipswitch,\u201d she\u2019s at a show, considering \u201cquitting and going home,\u201d until someone tells her: \u201cYou\u2019re staying here and it\u2019s gonna be fun.\u201d And so she does, and it is; from the stage, she sings, the crowd \u201clooked just like angels.\u201d Elsewhere, the transcendence comes through when she finds meaning beyond words: in the relationship between her fingerpicked guitar and Eliza Niemi\u2019s mournful cello on \u201cPennsy\u201d; in the way the band rises to match her vocal inflections on \u201cPortal to the Past\u201d; in the anguished, wordless refrain of \u201cElection Day\u201d; in several tracks\u2019 long, meandering outros that seem to work through her quandaries\u2014repeating them, turning them over, seeing them from new angles. Maybe it\u2019s my bias as a New Englander, but I think you can hear Seabird\u2019s natural affinity for the region in the songs\u2019 moody sprawl. \u201cBlackstar\u201d ends with nearly two minutes of repeated, downcast guitar riffs and muted percussion, which briefly perk up only to immediately slump; it captures something of the experience of driving through a northeast winter sunset, realizing total darkness is upon you and it\u2019s hardly past 4 p.m.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lily Seabird has a history of finding beauty in sordid places. Her stage name was borne of an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1192652,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3936],"tags":[31104,77,269,16,15,4715],"class_list":["post-1192651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-web"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117233671076539118","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1192651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192651\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1192652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1192651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1192651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1192651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}