Written by: Dave Cantrell

There are all these sayings we all get caught up in and not a few of them – no surprise given its daily impact – concern themselves with time, a couple of which, “good things come to those who wait” and “better late than never,” crashed into each other the other day at the mailbox when this CD, self-released last March, arrived unbidden and unexpected on a very sunny mountain morning in Northern California. And while the fact I’d no prior knowledge as to who the two individual artists are that make up this new duo might, at first blush, undermine the implied ‘Oh boy!’ premise of the above-stated, one quick listen to even just the first few tracks kicked any such rhetorical nitpicking to the curb and swiftly.

A project commenced in 2019 after the young, Melbourne-based singer-songwriter Tartie on, shall we say, the whims of desire, sent Binnie Klein, a long-time DJ on Bridgeport CT’s legendary WPKN, a song of hers called “Winter’s Girl” for hopeful airplay. While, of course, but a tiny drop in a relative tidal wave of submissions, the track nonetheless, rather instantly (always a good sign) turned Klein’s head and, crucially, her heart and by some instinctual reflex the radio host took an unexpected step beyond and sent the artist (located, by the way and to be exact, ten thousand four hundred fifteen miles away) a poem she’d just composed with the simple, unvarnished question: could this become a song? “I’ll give it a go” was Tartie’s immediate response and that go became “Orchard” the video for which rather swiftly hit 400k+ views which, in turn, as you might imagine, was testament enough to merit further (rather feverish) file sharing and here in our hands and thrilling our ears is the result, a 10-track debut from the newly-dubbed In These Trees and Tartie called The Quiver and, should you need to be somewhere and haven’t the time to finish reading this review, bear in mind that, reaction-wise, it could net be more precisely titled, a claim made instantly clear when the very same initial single opens the album.

Running the spectrum from intimate to universal in a way so thoroughly integrated with soul and sorrow, with lasting love and lasting hurt, that the chance of you not reacting from the absolute core off your human heart is well on nil and to wit, I must right off confess that when the track first reaches its epiphanal break around the line “let all the fruits fall down” I collapse every time, dropping into that kind of breath-caught, time-stopped, near-tears surrender that amounts to what I can only think to call ‘the innate emotional wow of recognition.’ Every…time. In any case, what a wonderfully revelatory way to begin a record and, as you’ve no doubt guessed, astute reader, it’s no fluke.

Embedded in a base layer of sonorous piano and, ultimately, a heartbreaking sway of strings, unflinching in its portrayal of betrayal (“how much was she worth?” an absolutely devastating line), your author having to cop once again to being floored in that dark ecstatic way only song can bring, shivers rising on his forearms, next track “Ablaze” leaves us speechless so we move on to – aptly given what you just read – the title track. Measured at its outset, come the second stanza “Quiver” jumps up the tempo via a full-band treatment and as such emerges as a gently urgent pop gem, its message, unabashedly, a simple piece of vital advice: accept the quakiness of life, how easily and often it can make us nervous and not a little uncertain, and “settle in to the quiver.” While tempting to label that cut an album highlight, that would (again no surpise) be eminently unfair to those not only already mentioned but those yet to come as well. Among them…

“Ghosts in our Room,” rising up into one of the most subtly-built and, as such, most powerful crescendos we’ve heard in some time and while not wishing to undermine the track’s innate strength (an impossibility in any case), it nonetheless finds itself in something of a candle-holding challenge to “Sky, Ocean” that immediately follows, the song, at 2:54 the album’s shortest by a hair, managing to somehow give an impression of being both taut and expansive, the tension and implausibility of that statement due primarily to that same full-band treatment that wells up midway, creating out of whole cloth one of those break-free moments where the joys and yearning of love and devotion are carried up and spirited away on the kind of whirlwind that the likes of David Lindley and such used to conjure in the feverish Zevonesque heydays of the mid-to-late 70s (which isn’t a shock we suppose given the presence of guitarist Jeff Pevar on this song and another – the similarly-indebted “Hailstorm” that also features co-legend Jerry Marotta on drums – but the cut would be a stunner no matter and on this, umm, note, please see the list of players down below and stand up and give them a hand. A crack unit).

To all this it’s incumbent upon us to add mention of the percussive yet piano-burnished ode to the gentle resurrection of the heart called “One through Ten,” of “Meet Me on the Mountain Top,” uplifting, countrified, somehow finding a way to be simultaneously grounding and soaring (which makes sense seeing as Tartie wrote it soon after she found out she was expecting her first child) and the steady and stirring “Shapes of Things to Come” that serves more or less as the album’s emotional coda, ending the record on what could not be a more hopeful and, frankly, inspiring note.

As anyone knows that’s familiar with our work here at SEM, with our overall perspective, we think it’s fair to say that, especially with regards to songwriting but true in varying degrees to all the arts, vulnerability, being the great leveler that it is, is (with no little irony) the single most powerful driver behind a lasting piece of work (Dylan, anyone?). It’s only through that most basic, inborn human trait that true strength can manifest in the first place, a lesson that, should it need relearning, is underscored  here on The Quiver with an aching but perseverant grace. In short, a very fine debut indeed. [get The Quiver here. See list of musicians directly below]

MUSICIANS:

John Andrews: guitars

David Baron: piano, keyboards

Renee Hikari: drums

Aaron Johnston: drums

Binnie Klein: backing vox

Jennifer Kreisberg: backing vox

Jeff Lipstein: drums, percussion

Olivier Manchon: viola

Jerry Marotta: drums & percussion

Jeff Pevar: guitars, mandolin

Alex Waterman: cello

Ben Zwerin: bass